Sans Serif vs. Serif (with children)
by , (3 comments)
Just saw this abstract of a research paper on how serif and sans serif fonts affect children’s ability to read. Thought it might be interesting since there have been several conversations about this before. Here’s the abstract:
“This paper describes part of the work of the Typographic Design for Children project at The University of Reading. The aim was to find out whether children found serif or sans serif types easier or more difficult to read, and whether they found text with infant characters easier or more difficult to read. We listened to 6-year-old children reading in a classroom, using specially designed, high quality test material set in Gill Sans and Century with and without infant characters. We also asked children for their views about the typefaces used. We used miscue analysis to study tapes of children?s reading to see whether more errors occurred in text set in a particular typeface. The substitution category of miscue was explored in more depth to see whether differences were attributable to typeface. The results show that children in our test group could read text set in Gill and Century equally well.”
- Walker S & Reynolds L. Information Design Journal, Serifs, sans serifs and infant characters in children’s reading books. Vol. 11, 2004.
Comments (3)
E. Tage Larsen said:
I was giving a reception for an someone﨎 alumni group last autumn. As part of their pitch for donations, they mentioned this private school﨎 progressive curriculum. When questioned, the spokeswoman said that recent studies had shown that young children are able to understand and participate quicker with cursive letterforms far earlier than print.
I冝 not heard of that before nor have I seen anything else.
Thanks for this post. Have you read the full paper?
Posted on January 14, 2005
Bennett said:
This is an interesting study. This seems to support Zuzana Licko’s quote “We read best what we read most”. We start out life not caring wether we are reading a serif or san-serif. As we become more used to seeing serif faced body copy we get more accustomed to it and it becomes easier to read.
I would like to see a study about ligatures and children, for purely personal reasons. I would assume that children, along with most people, would never notice them. That is of course the goal of most ligatures. To blend in. A few years back I ran into a client that insisted I leave out ligatures in my design because this particular publication would appear in elementary and middle schools. They were positive that teachers would not like ligatures. I always thought this was ridiculous. Of course, these were the same people that made an illustrator take a gun out of an illustration of Annie Oakley. It think that is taking the “no guns in school policy” to a new revisionist extreme.
Posted on January 18, 2005
newwavegurly said:
It would be interesting to see if the results would be the same utilizing a sans serif font that wasn’t a part of the English (British?) landscape. Since Gill Sans was developed for the London Underground system, I have to believe that people from all walks of life in the UK are exposed to it on a regular basis which could influence the legibility of it from an early age.
Posted on January 28, 2005