LEXIAD, THE FIRST DYSLEXIA-SPECIFIC CYRILLIC FONT COMPARED TO THE POPULAR TIMES NEW ROMAN AND ROBOTO FONTS WHEN READ BY ADULTS

Abstract

"The LexiaD font was developed for Russian-speaking people with reading disorders (dyslexia) (Alexeeva et al., 2020). LexiaD demonstrated an advantage in letter feature extraction and information integration over other modern Cyrillic fonts (PT Sans and PT Serif) while reading by primary school dyslexic and non-dyslexic children. However, for dyslexic and non-dyslexic adolescents, the familiar Arial font was more effective (Alexeeva, Zubov, 2020). In this study, we tested two possible reasons for the advantages of Arial: familiarity or its structure. LexiaD was compared to Times New Roman (TNR; another familiar font) and Roboto (a font similar to Arial, but less familiar than TNR) when reading texts printed on a paper page. The study involved 42 adults without reading disorders. The previous studies did not show that the font effect interacts with the participant group (with/without dyslexia). The participants read silently three parts of the text about Easter Island and answered comprehension questions. The texts and tasks were borrowed from The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). During the reading, eye movements were recorded using a mobile tracker (PupilCore) with a sampling frequency of 200 Hz. The mean word reading rate (reading speed) and the mean number of fixations per word were analyzed. Mixed-design ANOVA showed a significant difference between the fonts in reading speed (p=0.05) and the number of fixations (p=0.03). LexiaD was inferior to Roboto in both measures. There was no evidence that the control fonts differed from each other or LexiaD differed from TNR. Thus, it could be assumed that the design made Arial a facilitating font in the previous study. A longitudinal study of LexiaD is required to test how it will perform when it becomes more familiar to readers."