This article presumes the word-shape model if reading, which most reading psychologists believe to be inaccurate. The parallel-letter recognition article has the most experimental support. This paper by a reading psychologist at Microsoft (<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/wordrecognition.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/wordrecognition....</a>) has a good summary of the models and experimental evidence.
I've been interested in the caps issue for a while. I'm a native Hebrew speaker, and Hebrew doesn't have the idea of Capital letters - there is only one set.<p>I wonder <i>why</i> caps were even important. I mean, it's just another set of the same letters, what's it for?<p>After a while, I did find some uses for it. Namely, when reading books, if you come across a name you don't recognize (say, the name of a person), in Hebrew you can't tell that it's a name; for all you know, it's a word that you don't recognize and <i>not</i> a name.
All Caps is also hard to read because you spend your whole life reading sentence case. Its what we've trained our brains to look at and interpret.<p>One plus for All Caps: it makes filtering piles of resumes easier. If it's written in All Caps I toss it without reading.
Sometimes it is OK to use all caps. This is pointed out in the article, but worth noting again. You might want your text to read more as a shape. For instance, when using section headers that you want to be more uniform in appearance.
The <i>vertical</i> edge shape contrast has also been noted to have an effect on comprehension (as in ragged right vs full justification). A few resources/papers:<p><a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8535.1986.tb00491.x/abstract" rel="nofollow">http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8535.1986....</a>
<a href="http://kaiweber.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/ragged-right-or-justified-alignment/" rel="nofollow">http://kaiweber.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/ragged-right-or-jus...</a>
<a href="http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED337749&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED337749" rel="nofollow">http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_...</a>
I wonder though if this applies to languages like chinese or japanese. I know nothing about them but I'm pretty sure CAPS don't get any bigger. Does that make the language harder to comprehend?<p>I would have liked a more in-depth analysis personally.
The educational social systems we have train us to become better used to reading words in sentence case. I'm yet to see a study on little kids struggling to read in all caps before anything else. Give us something on this before concluding...
i have no problem with all caps. what really annoys me is when people don't use proper capitalization at the beginning of a sentence. what really makes me angry is when people defend this style with the "e. e. cummings used to do it" excuse. i can't parse paragraphs like these.
It is just a bit harder to recognize words written in caps.<p>When we're reading, we aren't recognizing each character and then combining them unconsciously into a word and then you comprehend it. We just recognize the words at once, and stops on an unfamiliar or out of context ones, which usually signals a misreading.<p>So, people are using caps when they need to EMPHASIZE something. ^_^<p>This article is trying to emphasize that the author cold understand things, that the rest of the world cannot. ^_^