The term bouma ( /ˈboʊmə/ boh-mə) is sometimes used in the work of cognitive psychology to mean the shape of a cluster of letters, often a whole word. It is a reduction of "Bouma-shape", which was probably first used in Paul Saenger's 1997 book Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, although Saenger himself attributes it to Insup & Maurice Martin Taylor. Its origin is in reference to hypotheses by a prominent vision researcher, H. Bouma, who studied the shapes and confusability of letters and letter strings.[1][2]
Some typographers have believed that, when reading, people can recognize words by deciphering boumas, not just individual letters. The claim is that this is a natural strategy for increasing reading efficiency. However, considerable study and experimentation by cognitive psychologists led to their general acceptance of a different, and largely contradictory, theory by the end of the 1980s: parallel letterwise recognition.[3][4][5][6] In recent years (2000–2010) this information has been more evangelized to typographers by Microsoft's Dr Kevin Larson, with conference presentations and a widely-read article.[7]