Ann Bessemans 
María Pérez Mena Communication goes bad when it lacks social connectedness. Speakers who make eye contact and proper voice inflections are more effective communicators. Speaker effectiveness is guaranteed by emoting and communicating with people, versus speaking dryly. Regular text is much like dry speakers. There isn’t any emoting; the emotion must be generated by the reader. Yet, for the reader, the work of detecting emotional cues in language (spoken and written) can be troublesome and harm comprehension. For young readers, this struggle is even greater since they are still developing their literacy skills. As general literacy skills are on average dropping with youngsters, providing new ways to better comprehend the text may contribute to making reading more proficient and engaging.
READSEARCH has already proved that type design can make prosody more visual within a balanced text image. Visualizing intensity, duration and pitch improves reading aloud and comprehension. Prosody and emotion are closely related to each other as they define the expression of the speaker, yet they are different. Prosody can change quickly over the course of a sentence, whereas emotions are generally constant over the course of a sentence and potentially over a thousand words . However, both visual prosody and emotion can make reading more efficient as they give readers skills and strategies to understand the text in a more efficient way.
Similar to the process of making prosody visual, READSEARCH invented a method to visualize emotions in type, suitable for continuous text purposes. In this presentation, we will show that kids (and probably you) are able to pick up emotions from the type design while reading, and that such kinds of social connections can be added to text and support better comprehension. We envision active participation to generate a fruitful discussion about emotion in type.