Capital letters
#8
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.
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Messages In This Thread
Capital letters - by Obi2Kenobi - 03-22-2009, 10:11 PM
Capital letters - by kandrathe - 03-22-2009, 10:23 PM
Capital letters - by --Pete - 03-22-2009, 10:52 PM
Capital letters - by Jester - 03-22-2009, 11:51 PM
Capital letters - by shoju - 03-24-2009, 03:31 PM
Capital letters - by Archon_Wing - 03-29-2009, 10:52 PM
Capital letters - by Obi2Kenobi - 05-04-2009, 06:55 PM
Capital letters - by weakwarrior - 05-04-2009, 07:07 PM
Capital letters - by Obi2Kenobi - 05-04-2009, 07:26 PM
Capital letters - by kandrathe - 05-05-2009, 01:56 PM
Capital letters - by Concillian - 05-07-2009, 08:35 PM
Capital letters - by --Pete - 05-07-2009, 09:25 PM
Capital letters - by Kevin - 05-07-2009, 09:31 PM
Capital letters - by --Pete - 05-07-2009, 09:52 PM
Capital letters - by Kevin - 05-07-2009, 10:23 PM
Capital letters - by Concillian - 05-08-2009, 02:35 AM
Capital letters - by --Pete - 05-08-2009, 03:05 AM
Capital letters - by Jim - 05-08-2009, 09:13 AM
Capital letters - by The Sandcat - 05-22-2009, 11:10 AM
Capital letters - by kandrathe - 06-21-2009, 02:07 PM
Capital letters - by Skywing - 06-22-2009, 01:06 AM

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