Reading ancient signals in a modern world

By Irina Matuzava

(First of two parts)

The oldest known engravings consist of zigzag patterns and parallel lines, carved into freshwater mussel shells at Trinil on the island of Java, Indonesia. These grooves, made by Homo erectus, date to roughly half a million years ago. By around 100,000 years ago, early Homo sapiens at Blombos Cave in South Africa were carving cross-hatched patterns into pieces of ocher. Long before anyone wrote down a word, our ancestors made marks with evident care. Neither the engravings at the Trinil site nor those at Blombos Cave can be considered writing, but they seem to represent a desire to deliberately shape a surface and give these marks specific forms.

Writing is a much more recent development, having evolved at least four times within the last 5,000 years: in Mesopotamia around 3400–3100 BCE; in Egypt around 3250 BCE; in China around 1250 BCE; and in Mesoamerica around 600–300 BCE, including the Maya script that developed independently at around 300–200 BCE. According to Discover magazine, “The oldest surviving texts come from very specific contexts, such as economic transactions in Mesopotamia and divination rituals in China. The first characters were mainly pictographic signs, depicting exactly what they referred to.”

In evolutionary terms, the invention of writing is considered extremely recent, as our genus Homo has existed for around 2.8 million years, and our species Homo sapiens for at least 300,000 years. For the overwhelming majority of human history, no one could read or write. However, the cultures that eventually invented writing carried their aesthetics and preferred methods of stylization in the scripts they created.

Today, our lives and communication methods are saturated with a vast array of fonts and typeface styles that go beyond simply conveying written information, raising the question of what effects fonts can have on people.

Partially, the answer lies in what came before writing and the first carved mark. Long before humans developed writing and spoken language reached its modern complexity, we were communicating through visual signals. Much of the emotional content of a face-to-face interaction is not conveyed through spoken words, but through nonverbal cues. Posture, gestures, facial expression, gaze, and tone of voice all contribute to the communication of the message and the manner in which it is received.

Fluency in visual signals did not originate with humans, as reflected in the abilities of primates to produce and interpret visual communication. In 1872, Charles Darwin argued in his book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, that human facial expressions share a common heritage with those of other animals. Following advancements in ethological analysis of primate facial and gestural communication in the 1960s, Frans de Waal proposed that the growing evidence of group-specific signaling conventions among primates strongly resembles, or can be considered, a cultural variation. Studies of orangutans and gorillas show that these apes use signals intentionally to attract the attention of others. In addition, they modify their signal depending on whether the recipient is watching, demonstrating an awareness that the communication is being seen and understood.

Katja Liebal and Linda Oña’s 2018 review of primate communication found a pattern: gestures are used flexibly. Their meaning shifts according to the situational context, in contrast to vocal calls, which tend to be more fixed. Meanwhile, Uwe Jürgens helped explain this contrast in primate vocalization in “Vocal Communication in Primates”: a call’s form is largely determined by genetics, while its meaning is acquired through repetition and context. A reader or listener does not determine a particular gesture, vocal call, or letterform, but instead, its meaning is learned and context dependent.

When writing emerged, it did so within a species already equipped with sophisticated visual communication systems sensitive to form, color, and deliberate marks, with a few patterns that could be identified in the origins and development of ancient scripts. For instance, many script inventions evolved within preexisting iconographic or hieroglyphic systems. Even as early scripts became more abstract and moved away from their pictographic origins, the shapes retained visual properties that readers processed alongside meaning. With the later invention of the printing press in the 15th century, typography created consistent cues for readers as characters became identical throughout a document, setting them apart from most visual experiences.

Research reveals that letters are actually not processed visually in the same manner as shapes. This distinction, revealed in a series of experiments by Isabel Gauthier and her coauthors, has significant implications for the impact of fonts. Our visual system develops cortical specialization for letters. Certain areas in the left occipito-temporal cortex respond more strongly to letters than to other stimuli, such as generic shapes. Gauthier proposes that font tuning is the driver for this specialization: similar to how the brain develops specialized processing of faces, it can recognize letters more promptly through increased exposure to print. According to a 2011 study by Stanislas Dehaene and Laurent Cohen, this is known as neuronal recycling: the reading brain repurposes the visual machinery that long predates writing.

A 2018 article by researcher Peter Walker also investigated whether the visual system becomes selectively tuned to specific fonts, and whether this tuning affects perception and performance. Walker’s framework proposes that readers maintain “a set of font-specific translation rules” in their working memory, which is directed by their “implicit knowledge” of the structural identity of each letter and symbol.

Capital H, for example, is always represented as two vertical strokes connected by a horizontal mark, but each typeface will structure the shapes of these marks differently. Well-designed fonts, whether made by master calligraphers or standardized for print, share a common style across all their characters. After seeing the first few letters of a text, a reader can predict the letters that will follow.

The evidence by Walker supports the account that font processing is rule-based rather than image-based, as switching fonts causes considerable slowdowns in processing time. These lags occur even with familiar typefaces and increase with the degree of dissimilarity between two fonts. Font-specific rules are quickly forgotten from working memory. When the repetition of a particular font becomes more probable, readers will implicitly hold on to the rules for longer.

The effects of typography, however, go beyond processing speed and reading efficiency; fonts also shape how we feel about what we read.

Typography, as typographer and poet Robert Bringhurst observed, gives letterforms “tone, timbre, character, just as words and sentences do.” Eva R. Brumberger’s 2003 study published in Technical Communication found “that readers do consistently ascribe particular personality attributes to particular typefaces and text passages.” She concluded that “visual language is analogous to verbal language in carrying connotations,” and that typefaces are not neutral messengers. Some read as more elegant, others come across as more direct, while others are characterized as friendly. These attributions are consistent across readers and stable enough to be mapped.

Brumberger also found that text passages carry “personas” independent of the typeface, meaning that readers simultaneously process two messages in parallel: the content of the text or the verbal content, and its visual form and style. “[T]he persona readers ascribe to texts most probably is determined by the language of the text, the style in which it is written, the topic on which it focuses, and the purpose and audience for which it is intended,” the study found.

These two messages often interact, as demonstrated by Samuel Juni and Julie S. Gross in their 2008 study “Emotional and Persuasive Perception of Fonts.” Juni and Gross presented 102 university students with identical satirical excerpts from the New York Times but in different fonts; one version was written in Times New Roman (TNR), and the other in Arial. Results showed that readers rated the TNR version as angrier and funnier and therefore more satirical, as compared to the text in Arial. The font change did not necessarily add an emotional tone to the text, but interacted with the emotional qualities of the writing. Crucially, participants were unaware of the effects typefaces had on text interpretation, and no participant identified the typeface as the source of the difference.

This study further found that fonts carry emotional meaning and shape personality attribution. The same text in different fonts can be interpreted as friendlier, more playful, more serious, or more formal. These traits affect how a text’s message is perceived and interpreted, as well as its persuasive ability. (To be concluded)

Irina Matuzava is a writer and researcher. She is a contributor to the Human Bridges project. This article was produced by Human Bridges.