The Relative Importance of Spaces and Meaning in Reading

The relative importance of meaning (semantic context) and spaces between words during reading was investigated. Sub jects read paragraphs of coherent or incoherent text aloud; some paragraphs were presented normally, others with spaces between words removed. Coherent paragraphs were taken from a short story. Incoherent paragraphs had the same words and punctuation as the coherent paragraphs, but the order of these words was randomized, resulting in text devoid of meaning normally provided by context and syntactical structure. As expected, spaced text was read faster and with fewer prommciation errors than unspaced text, and coherent text was read faster and with fewer pronunciation errors than incoherent texz regardless of the presence or absence of spaces between words. Removing spaces slowed reading down less and caused fewer pronunciation errors when the text was meaningful (coherent), than when the text was meaningless (incoherent), so spaces helped more when the text was meaningless than when the text was meaningful. The fact that spaces between words were more important for reading meaningless text than for reading meaningful text suggests that semantics, rather than spaces, are the more important determinants of reading speed and errors.