I've been studying a lot about type legibility and readability and found a helpful slideshow with lots of graphical examples describing a handful of important considerations when creating type and also page layout. Anyway, just thought I'd share it if anyone is interested:

http://www.slideshare.net/shawncalvert/15-type-rules-intro-to-gd-wk-11-presentation

That word shape myth can’t be killed apparently. Other than that, the presentation is okay. Typography 101. 

2 hours ago, Ralf Herrmann said:

That word shape myth can’t be killed apparently. 

That’s exactly the nature of myths 

It also happens, for example, for the notion that alphabetic graphemes are in some way derived from phonemes (other than in hangul, of course).

From the paper you linked to:

Quote

Given that all the reading research psychologists I know support some version of the parallel letter recognition model of reading, how is it that all the typographers I know say that we read by matching whole word shapes?

I think it’s in part because it nicely complements the widely held notions that serifs and lowercase are better for continuous reading.

It also happens to lend itself to create nice and easy graphics related to the importance of whitespace. So perhaps it would help to have some equally easy and nice graphics better illustrating the issue.