Bouma
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In typography, a bouma (Template:IPAc-en Template:Respell) 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.<ref>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.</ref>
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.<ref>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.</ref> 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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation
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