Worttrennung am Zeilenende

In the first part of his study, the author describes the rules for hyphenating German words in such a way that the surprisingly complex interaction between the rules becomes clear; in this, his account differs from the official rules. It elaborates a characteristic feature of hyphenation rules, namely that a distinction has to be made between 'stronger' and 'weaker' rules. In the second part, he presents empirical studies which firstly ' and for the first time ' analyse readers' eye movements when reading hyphenated words, and secondly analyse how primary school pupils hyphenate.