To boldly go where no text has gone before: The effects of boldface letters on eye movements in reading

Abstract

Over the years, numerous speed-reading technologies have proposed ways for people to improve their reading speed and efficiency. The current study empirically tested Bionic Reading’s claims that bolding the first half of words provides an optimal location for the eyes to land and is enough to process the entire word. Participants read paragraphs in five bolding conditions to see how reading patterns and eye movements were impacted. Bionic Reading’s claims were not supported by this study, as bolding the first half of every word did not facilitate reading relative to bolding the middle half or last half of every word and, in fact, led to costs relative to regular unbolded reading. Additionally, visual access to only the first few letters was not enough to recognize whole words. The differential effects of bolding were also explored across different individual difference measures, but Bionic Reading was not found to be beneficial for any specific population on reading speed or in eye movement measures.