"The Science of Word Recognition" is a comprehensive rebuttal of the word shape theory of word recognition, as first posited by James Cattell in 1886. At the time, this theory, which explains that words are recognized by their shape rather than by individual letters, was based on 4 experimental findings: 1. the Word Superiority Effect (letters are recognized better in the context of words), 2. the fact that we read lowercase letters at a faster rate than uppercase letters, 3. misspellings are frequently overlooked when the shape of the overall word is not changed by the mistake ( tesf vs. tesc ), and 4. text that is a mix of upper and lowercase letters is difficult to read. However, these 4 findings have other logical explanations. For instance, the context provided by the word itself is what allows the reader to remember the letters in a word. Take, for example, acronyms. When acronyms are used to study, like KPCOFGS (King Philip Came Over From Geneva, Switzerla
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