Manipulating Interword and Interletter Spacing in Cursive Script: An Eye Movements Investigation of Reading Persian

摘要

Persian is an Indo-Iranian language that features a derivation of Arabic cursive script,where most letters within words are connectable to adjacent letters with ligatures. Twoexperiments are reported where the properties of Persian script were utilized to investigatethe effects of reducing interword spacing and increasing the interletter distance (ligature)within a word. Experiment 1 revealed that decreasing interword spacing while extendinginterletter ligature by the same amount was detrimental to reading speed. Experiment 2largely replicated these findings. The experiments show that providing the readers withinaccurate word boundary information is detrimental to reading rate. This was achieved byreducing the interword space that follows letters that do not connect to the next letter inExperiment 1, and replacing the interword space with ligature that connected the words inExperiment 2. In both experiments, readers were able to comprehend the text read, despitethe considerable costs to reading rates in the experimental conditions.