Increasing the space between letters helps children with dyslexia to read, finds study
A study has found that increasing the space between letters and words in a piece of text makes it easier for children suffering from dyslexia to read more fluently, a report on ScienceDaily.com states.
A research team at Aix-Marseille University in France tested dyslexic Italian and French children and found that widening the spaces between letters and words allowed the children to read 20% faster with half as many errors. The researchers believe that increased spacing helps children susceptible to “perceptual crowding”, which masks individual letters.
On average, one children in every class and 5% of the world’s population suffer from dyslexia, a learning difficulty that makes it difficult for sufferers to identify letters and words.
The hope is that the discovery will improve the treatment of dyslexia, which can make reading “torture” for children.
An iPad/iPhone app, known as DYS, has also been developed in conjunction with the research that allows parents and children to adjust the spacing between letters.
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