In typography, a bouma (/ˈboʊmə/BOH-mə) is the shape of a cluster of letters, often a whole word. It is a reduction of "Bouma-shape", which was probably first used in Paul Saenger's 1997 book Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, although Saenger himself attributes it to Insup & Maurice Martin Taylor. Its origin is in reference to hypotheses by the prominent vision researcher Herman Bouma, who studied the shapes and confusability of letters and letter strings.[1]
Some typographers believe that, when reading, people can recognize words by deciphering boumas, not just individual letters, or that the shape of the word is related to readability and/or legibility. The claim is that this is a natural strategy for increasing reading efficiency. However, considerable study and experimentation by cognitive psychologists led to their general acceptance of a different, and largely contradictory, theory by the end of the 1980s: parallel letterwise recognition.[2] Since 2000, parallel letterwise recognition has been more evangelized to typographers by Microsoft's Dr Kevin Larson, via conference presentations and a widely read article.[3] Nonetheless, ongoing research (starting from 2009) often supports the bouma model of reading.[4]
^Bouma, H., (1971), "Visual Recognition of Isolated Lower-Case Letters", Vision Research, 11, 459-474. - Bouma, H., (1973), "Visual Interference in the Parafoveal Recognition of Initial and Final Letters of Words", Vision Research, 13, 762-782.
^Adams, M.J., (1979), "Models of word recognition", Cognitive Psychology, 11, 133-176. - McClelland, J.L. & Johnson, J.C. (1977), "The role of familiar units in perception of words and nonwords", Perception and Psychophysics, 22, 249-261. - Paap, K.R., Newsome, S.L., & Noel, R.W. (1984), "Word shape’s in poor shape for the race to the lexicon", Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 10, 413-428. - Rayner, K. (1975), "The perceptual span and peripheral cues in reading", Cognitive Psychology, 7, 65-81.
