Reading has always been an integral part of both professional and personal life. Character and layout recognition and understanding by computers are well-explored areas. Nevertheless, how characters and layout are read and perceived by humans remains relatively underexplored. This work contributes to the field of human-document interaction (HDI) by investigating the effects of character and layout personalization on readability. The paper presents an empirical study on how parts-of-speech (POS)-based character and layout modifications can lead to overall improvements in both reading comprehension and memorization for two non-segmented, non-Latin writing systems: Khmer and Japanese. The experimental results from 43 participants suggest that, by bolding POS-derived content words, Khmer readers perform better on both reading comprehension and memorisation tasks, with a significant effect (p-values of 0.03 and 0.04, respectively). A similar overall tendency is also observed in a pilot study among Japanese readers (10 participants) using syntactic color-coding. In addition, the analyses of reading time, answering time, and perceived difficulty reveal that the proposed text styling technique does not increase any perceived difficulty, cognitive load, or reading effort for the Khmer readers. However, the Japanese readers experienced a decrease in reading speed. This study and its findings represent a significant step towards enabling dynamic, script-dependent personalization of character and layout to optimize human readability.

翻译：阅读始终是职业与个人生活中不可或缺的组成部分。计算机对字符与版式的识别与理解已是得到充分探索的领域。然而，人类如何阅读并感知字符与版式这一问题仍相对缺乏深入研究。本研究通过探究字符与版式个性化对可读性的影响，为人类-文档交互领域作出贡献。本文基于词性对字符与版式进行修改，并针对两种非分词、非拉丁书写系统——高棉文与日文，开展了一项实证研究，探讨此类修改如何整体提升阅读理解与记忆效果。来自43名参与者的实验结果表明，通过对词性衍生的实词进行加粗处理，高棉文读者在阅读理解与记忆任务中均表现更优，且效果显著（p值分别为0.03与0.04）。在一项针对日文读者的初步研究中（10名参与者），采用句法着色编码也观察到类似的整体趋势。此外，通过对阅读时间、作答时间及感知难度的分析发现，所提出的文本样式技术并未增加高棉文读者的感知难度、认知负荷或阅读负担。然而，日文读者的阅读速度有所下降。本研究及其发现标志着在实现动态、依文字特性而定的字符与版式个性化以优化人类可读性方面迈出了重要一步。