Does capitalization of nouns aid reading comprehension?

Question

German is the only widely used language prescribing capitalization of nouns in the written language. I speak English and German fluently myself, but I can read German texts significantly faster than English ones. I also use sometimes speed reading techniques (depending on known/unknown topic, skimming a longer text) and it seems to me that especially here the capitalization of nouns works like syntax-highlighting, which obviously is highly useful. German philologists seem split on the question of whether capitalization has more advantages than disadvantages.

One consideration for me is that we actually seem mainly to focus on the first letters of a word with our eyes to recognize and memorize it (see this question) or skim smaller words in fixed and frequently occurring word groups (e.g. "at the beginning"). Speed reading techniques say you should also focus on words when moving your focus from right to left and so double-scan the text.

So are my assumptions backed by research results? Are there plans to establish capitalization of nouns in any other languages? Are there already languages with non-Roman alphabets using another type of syntax-highlighting?

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Edit: As additional hint/proof i want to add that in german forums, you often see people not capitalizing every noun as they cannot tip with 10 fingers or are just used to it in chats. Especially in german Usenet you often see then posts from other users complaining about this style as it makes it significantly harder to read such posts in their opinion.

Answer 1

The cognitive psychological fact I remember from ancient papers (1970's?) is that, in order of difficulty of reading:

• all caps "HOW EASY IS THIS TO READ?"
• all lower case "how easy is this to read?"
• title case, all major words capitalized: "How Easy is This to Read?"

And this is done in a (presumably monolingual) English population. I don't remember if this is only for titles of for longer narratives or for any length.

From a cursory web search it seems the trend in culture in English is for headlines to be in sentence case (just the first word capitalized, the rest lower case), with the unsupported justification that sentence case 'is easier to read'. As to individuals writing, any kind of capitalization is more difficult than not, because of the extra finger to use to 'shift'.

It's very difficult to say that in general reading is easier in one language rather than another because of so many confounding variables (translation, culture, education, etc) forgetting all the language specific discrepancies.

But similarly, comparing speed of reading one passage with another modified passage is confounding because the difficulty of the change itself may outweigh the ostensible benefits.

As to your other questions, just because there is an experimental justification of a certain technique (capitalization) doesn't mean the culture is in any way receptive to it. Spelling reform in English, despite its simple engineering basis, is considered close to 'flat-earth' theories in adoptability. I don't know of any other languages where the language leaders are intentionally trying to change capitalization or use some kind of syntax marking.