05-04-2009, 07:07 PM
Quote:However, I know of no way to reliably test this. Any long-term study involving a group of people reading lots of lower-case only vs. proper-case only text for a while could always be answered with "Well, they've spent their whole life with primarily proper-case for long texts, so they're still more used to it.", so the hypothesis that capitalization isn't inherently significant in the difference of reading speed + comprehension isn't falsifiable, which is concerning to me.
Some languages don't have capital letters, Hebrew comes to mind, so if you could find a way to have the test run in one of those languages with some newly invented capital letter (which doesn't look too different from the non-capital letters - there are different scripts so you could use one of the other scripts for the beginning of sentences) it would be a point of comparison.
Incidentally, the fact that you can't prove that capital letters help doesn't mean you can't prove that they don't. So run the test on a large text, if there is no difference in reading speed then Jester's point is wrong.