明星八卦

Reading is vital to every aspect of modern life, exacerbated by reliance of the internet, email, and social media on the written medium. During reading, letters comprising a word are recognised, combined, and converted into meaning and sound. Letter confusability refers to how visually similar different letters are to each other (“v-w” is more confusable than “v-l”). Confusability affects readability, as observed in reading errors and processing speed of dyslexic individuals.

This research depends on confusability ratings between a target letter and other letters of the alphabet, and current resources are insufficient.

This project will: (1) develop confusion matrices that precisely capture letter similarity for lower and upper case; (2) use visual distortion to filter out attributes critical in letter processing to test which letters are susceptible to confusion.

These matrices will constitute a valuable new resource for studies in letter perception and reading processes in skilled and dyslexic readers.