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The Effect of Font Size on Reading Comprehension on Second and Fifth Grade Children: Bigger Is Not Always Better
Research on reading development has focused on the linguistic, cognitive, and recently, metacognitive skills children must master in order to learn to read. Less focus has been devoted to how the text itself, namely the perceptual features of the words, affects children’s learning and comprehension....
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2013
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777945/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24069266 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0074061 |
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author | Katzir, Tami Hershko, Shirley Halamish, Vered |
author_facet | Katzir, Tami Hershko, Shirley Halamish, Vered |
author_sort | Katzir, Tami |
collection | PubMed |
description | Research on reading development has focused on the linguistic, cognitive, and recently, metacognitive skills children must master in order to learn to read. Less focus has been devoted to how the text itself, namely the perceptual features of the words, affects children’s learning and comprehension. In this study, we manipulated perceptual properties of text by presenting reading passages in different font sizes, line lengths, and line spacing to 100 children in the second and fifth grades. For second graders (Experiment 1), decreasing font size, as well as increasing line length, yielded significantly lower comprehension scores. Line spacing had no effect on performance. For fifth graders (Experiment 2), decreasing font size yielded higher comprehension scores, yet there were no effects for line length and line spacing. Results are discussed within a "desirable difficulty" approach to reading development. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-3777945 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2013 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-37779452013-09-25 The Effect of Font Size on Reading Comprehension on Second and Fifth Grade Children: Bigger Is Not Always Better Katzir, Tami Hershko, Shirley Halamish, Vered PLoS One Research Article Research on reading development has focused on the linguistic, cognitive, and recently, metacognitive skills children must master in order to learn to read. Less focus has been devoted to how the text itself, namely the perceptual features of the words, affects children’s learning and comprehension. In this study, we manipulated perceptual properties of text by presenting reading passages in different font sizes, line lengths, and line spacing to 100 children in the second and fifth grades. For second graders (Experiment 1), decreasing font size, as well as increasing line length, yielded significantly lower comprehension scores. Line spacing had no effect on performance. For fifth graders (Experiment 2), decreasing font size yielded higher comprehension scores, yet there were no effects for line length and line spacing. Results are discussed within a "desirable difficulty" approach to reading development. Public Library of Science 2013-09-19 /pmc/articles/PMC3777945/ /pubmed/24069266 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0074061 Text en © 2013 Katzir et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Katzir, Tami Hershko, Shirley Halamish, Vered The Effect of Font Size on Reading Comprehension on Second and Fifth Grade Children: Bigger Is Not Always Better |
title | The Effect of Font Size on Reading Comprehension on Second and Fifth Grade Children: Bigger Is Not Always Better |
title_full | The Effect of Font Size on Reading Comprehension on Second and Fifth Grade Children: Bigger Is Not Always Better |
title_fullStr | The Effect of Font Size on Reading Comprehension on Second and Fifth Grade Children: Bigger Is Not Always Better |
title_full_unstemmed | The Effect of Font Size on Reading Comprehension on Second and Fifth Grade Children: Bigger Is Not Always Better |
title_short | The Effect of Font Size on Reading Comprehension on Second and Fifth Grade Children: Bigger Is Not Always Better |
title_sort | effect of font size on reading comprehension on second and fifth grade children: bigger is not always better |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777945/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24069266 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0074061 |
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