> unpublished study is finding that adding prosody to text improves children’s comprehension.
As a dyslexic software engineer who knows by heart a good number of the 50 tables in the open font type specification, I'd like to look into this in more detail but there is no code or paper published about this (yet).
In the mean time, it would be nice for people stop using dyslexics as an excuse to motivate for their own special interests. I've suffered my entire formative years under this low-key Munchausen by proxy from all sort of educators gass-lighting me into believing I should use some technology that in the fullness of time proved to be counter productive.
But ok, the variable speed HOI animation looks cool, I'll give you that.
As a former teacher who's done original research in educational psychology, I'd like to add that educational psychology is just a grab-bag of weak correlations whose discovery was motivated by, 'When I was a teacher, I saw ______ and that made me sad.' Any 'theory' is a just-so story that the researcher assembled from ideas they found aesthetically pleasing. It's not science; it's activity without achievement, because the individual pieces of research can't be assembled into a coherent body of knowledge.
The typeface looks nice though.
School administrators sometimes implement the stupidest policies based on correlations of various strengths. But even a strong correlation might have nothing to do with causation.
E.g.: A school my wife used to work at is requiring all 8th graders to take algebra (normally a high-school-level class in the US) regardless of math aptitude because some study shows that 8th graders who take algebra have improved outcomes. Nevermind the fact that this is almost certainly because kids who are already good at math will both take algebra AND have improved outcomes.
Continuing with the logic of that school, most wildly successful people were bullied at school.....
And many of them lost a parent at an early age.
Both parents in an armed robbery is weakly correlated with successful outcomes.
Depending on what “algebra” as an entire class actually is (I don’t know of it in that form from my Australian upbringing or from elsewhere) I can see it possibly having real benefit: abstract reasoning is one of the major things that needs to be taught to kids and has huge benefits but too often isn’t particularly taught; and algebra with all its symbolic representations and logical reasoning is excellent for that.
From your single-paragraph anecdote I don’t know the full story, of course, but it’s plausible to me that it might be not solely a case of confusing correlation and causation, but at least partly because the described effect made sense to people making the decisions, based on their broad experience in education.
The point is that they're teaching algebra without ensuring that the students are proficient in the prerequisites, so those students who are behind are not actually learning anything. You might as well teach it in first grade for all the good it's doing.
honestly, teaching the concept of a variable in first grade might not be the worst idea in the world
Somewhere out there, an economist who has dedicated their life to causal inference is crying
> I'd like to add that educational psychology is just a grab-bag of weak correlations whose discovery was [un]motivated
That's not just educational psychology. All of child psychology and child development is like that. People still talk as if Piaget might have been on to something.
Note that while the article doesn't really provide anything convincing, there is good reason to believe that indicating prosody makes it easier for children to understand written text.
The argument is just that, despite the writing system making absolutely no provision for any indication of prosody, native speakers keep spontaneously adding such indications to their writing. Look at this sidethread comment:
> A school my wife used to work at is requiring all 8th graders to take algebra (normally a high-school-level class in the US) regardless of math aptitude because some study shows that 8th graders who take algebra have improved outcomes. [italics show prosody]
> Nevermind the fact that this is almost certainly because kids who are already good at math will both take algebra AND have improved outcomes. [italics show prosody, and since that wasn't enough here, capitalization does too]
Or here's the New York Times in 1993:
> I used to speak in a regular voice. I was able to assert, demand, question. Then I started teaching. At a university? And my students had this rising intonation thing? It was particularly noticeable on telephone messages. "Hello? Professor Gorman? This is Albert? From feature writing?" [question marks show prosody]
( https://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/15/magazine/on-language-like... )
If it's important enough that everyone feels the need to write it down even though they aren't supposed to, it's probably important to children too.
Actually, I should point out that commas show prosody and are often covered as doing so in formal instruction, though formal instruction is at least as likely to take the viewpoint that commas occur for no particular reason and you just have to memorize when it is or isn't appropriate to use them.
Psychology is filled with bad science and bad scientists. It's not that good psychology research doesn't exist, it is just rare.
[flagged]
As a dyslexic font nerd, I have a question for you. Does Comic Sans actually help? Lots of people claim it's the easiest for dyslexics to read. I'm not dyslexic, but I set all my chat windows to Comic Sans because I've found that it helps me read it.
Curious if the claims have truth to them.
Dunno, at least not for me. But is it not dubious that literally the one font that everyone has been conditioned to dislike through the power of memes is then magically the one that then must be helpful for dyslexics? Like why not any one of the other terrible fonts that shipped with Windows XP like Papyrus. Feels like magical thinking to me.
Even designing a study to find the "right" font for dyslexics would sit strange with me. I remember not liking to read certain text because of the way they where printed, but this had more to do with me being unfamiliar with the typeset and not necessary its inherent qualities. These days it is much easier for me to pick up new skills because I know so much already, but for someone with a learning disability it is hard to acquire more then one skill at a time. So my advice, pick one font and stick to it.
Actually maybe this is bad advice. Perhaps focus specifically on learning to read many different fonts. I found my education to be very paternalistic and intellectually unstimulating. It is hard having an asymmetric IQ, with the verbal IQ of an average person, combined with the spatial intelligence of a genius and the motor skills of a moron.
I think you can say about dyslexics what I've heard said about autism, that it is not a spectrum but a constellation of different neurological phenomena that are hard to classify on a single axis. Is Pluto a planet with a moon that is bigger than itself or just some random trans Neptunian object we like to obsess about.
I did some more thinking on this. Font technology like this could be useful for a better stylo + touch-screen interface where the handwriting is translated to real characters while still having the same visual quality of the handwriting. You'll need lots more styles though, and very complicated user interaction in the background.
When Windows forces me to sign in to install it, I can't help but feel it's subsidizing this entire design silo. In the next episode, now lets make everyone (including dyslexic people) jump through even more hoops to install Windows to subsidize the creation of a font that even if it did help dyslexic people that I would not be able to use since it was at the expense of everyone else. YMMV.