joeclark: The point that I was making to CDL.TO, when he indicated that he could sometimes only see the top half of the single word naming the subway station when he was looking out the window opposite him, is that looking at only the top half of a word generally reveals the meaning of that word easier than looking at only the bottom half. The test I gave explains that. The word-superiority effect doesn't negate the fact that if you draw a horizontal line along the mid-point of the x-height of a word or sentence that uses upper and lower case letters the meaning of the word or sentence is revealed more easily by looking at the upper portion, including ascenders. When fate has selectively determined for you which part of a word you can see, as in the single-word ( station name ) case we were discussing, the design of the letters comes into play as a way of revealing their meaning - though, admittedly, this works better with upper-and-lower-case examples, whereas all the station names are actually in caps.