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Speed-reading courses
Speed reading was launched into public popularity in the United States with the introduction of the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics program in 1959. Evelyn Wood was a high school teacher who claimed that she could read very fast with good comprehension by grasping whole phrases in a single glance. Together with her husband, she formed a company to teach speed reading via this method. Very quickly the number of franchises throughout the United States grew. Wood and her husband eventually sold the company, but the basic principles that she advocated still form the foundations of most current speed-reading training courses. These courses attempt to teach students to change certain aspects of the reading process while maintaining the same input method, such as a book or computer display.
Increasing the perceptual span
Advocates of training courses make a number of assumptions about how silent reading occurs and how speed can be increased without sacrificing comprehension. Central to these claims is the idea that our brain is rather lazy and that we effectively process much less than we are actually capable of. A specific claim is that readers have the ability take in much more information in a single glance than they normally do and that training can “unlock” this ability. For example, in two-thirds of a sample of 40 books on speed-reading methods reviewed by Brozo and Johns (1986), the claim is made that a reader’s span of recognition can be improved with practice. Most of the books also strongly advocated against making regressive eye movements while reading. A survey of a sample of more recent publications that we undertook revealed that they contained similar ideas, including recommendations to use peripheral vision to expand the number of words that can be read in a single fixation and to reduce regressive eye movements. The argument is that, after training, speed readers can process entire groups of words and phrases in a single fixation. At the extreme, it is claimed that speed readers can zigzag down one page and up the other page, processing the information in the text much more efficiently than normal skilled readers do.
The evidence that we have reviewed on normal reading challenges these claims. First, what limits our ability to process text is our capacity to recognize words and understand text (e.g., Miellet et al., 2009). It is highly unlikely that we can increase this ability by learning to make eye movements differently. Second, processing words out of order from the sensible sequence of the sentence (Masson, 1986) or when some of the words are removed (Fisher & Shebilske, 1985)—as would happen when a speed reader uses a zigzag movement—impairs the ability to process and understand the words. Third, regressive eye movements actually support comprehension (Schotter, Tran, & Rayner, 2014) rather than causing a problem for reading. Together, these facts about reading suggest that the ability to read is limited by our ability to attend to, identify, and understand words rather than our ability to see them. Even if our vision could be improved, we would not necessarily read faster. This conclusion is consistent with the finding that attempts to train readers to use peripheral vision more effectively with simple perceptual tasks that flash words in the periphery have not been successful in allowing them to read more quickly with good comprehension (Brim, 1968; Sailor & Ball, 1975).
Suppressing the inner voice
Another claim that underlies speed-reading courses is that, through training, speed readers can increase reading efficiency by inhibiting subvocalization. This is the speech that we often hear in our heads when we read. This inner speech is an abbreviated form of speech that is not heard by others and that may not involve overt movements of the mouth but that is, nevertheless, experienced by the reader. Speed-reading proponents claim that this inner voice is a habit that carries over from fact that we learn to read out loud before we start reading silently and that inner speech is a drag on reading speed. Many of the speed-reading books we surveyed recommended the elimination of inner speech as a means for speeding comprehension (e.g., Cole, 2009; Konstant, 2010; Sutz, 2009). Speed-reading proponents are generally not very specific about what they mean when they suggest eliminating inner speech (according to one advocate, “at some point you have to dispense with sound if you want to be a speed reader”; Sutz, 2009, p. 11), but the idea seems to be that we should be able to read via a purely visual mode and that speech processes will slow us down.
However, research on normal reading challenges this claim that the use of inner speech in silent reading is a bad habit. As we discussed earlier, there is evidence that inner speech plays an important role in word identification and comprehension during silent reading (see Leinenger, 2014). Attempts to eliminate inner speech have been shown to result in impairments in comprehension when texts are reasonably difficult and require readers to make inferences (Daneman & Newson, 1992; Hardyck & Petrinovich, 1970; Slowiaczek & Clifton, 1980). Even people reading sentences via RSVP at 720 wpm appear to generate sound-based representations of the words (Petrick, 1981).