Reading speed
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Reading speed is the tempo at which you read texts, usually measured by words per minute (wpm).
History
The first researcher who took notice of differences in reading speed and extensively wrote on the matter was George Romanes, he went on to claim in his book Mental Evolution in Animals that he found readers who read four times as fast as others of, apparently the same intelligence..[1] Johann Joachim Quantz who came across his work, decided to write a study and went on to publicize his works, he made a distinction between very slow and very rapid readers. The former had a reading rate of 3.9 words per second (234 wpm), the latter a rate of 7.3 words per second (438 wpm). Moreover, he also noted that quickness of perception, with its large physiological element, is an important factor in deciding one's rate of reading and that speed reading ultimately results in a sacrifice (or exactness) of intelligence. He however attributed these findings to general intelligence, which would later become g[2]
Due to the fact that Quantz didn't publicize his methodology, Edmund B. Huey wrote a separate article on reading speed, and came up with a series of tests, where eleven pages, containing 405 words were selected from an interesting novel which would be read by the readers. Huey would then measure the time with a stopwatch and find that the average silent reading speed, using Huey's standardized method is 5.91 words per second (355 wpm), Auditory was at 5.12 (307 wpm) and reading aloud 3.55 words per second (213 wpm). The slowest reader had a segmental affection of the retina, which undoubtedly affected his speed. The next slowest reader was a Japanese student.[3]
Miles Tinker was the first psychologist to publish multiple articles on reading speed and reading comprehnesion, he used the Chapman-Cook Speed of Reading test. It had two forms, each containing 30 paragraphs of 30 words. Toward the end of the paragraph there was an awkward word spoiling the paragraph. Participants had to tick off the word and finish as many paragraphs as possible in 1.75 min. An example of a paragraph was: “Yesterday I went downtown to buy some shoes and rubbers, but when I got home, I found I had forgotten to go to the flower-store to get them.” University undergraduates typically finished some 18 paragraphs (540 words) in 1.75 min, making a reading speed of 316.3 wpm for roman, and 294.5 for italic. With a standard deviation of 61.4 and 72.4 respectively.[4] He also noted that material read in lower cases was read 13.4 percent faster than in all capital letters[5]
Comprehension and speed
Miles Thinker was also the first researcher to take notice of reading comprehension, and wrote an article about it in 1939 and he accordingly said that speed of reading can have no other meaning than speed of comprehension, since "reading" without comprehension is not reading. he used 5 standardized reading tests from easy to difficult to measure comprehension. The subjects were all university students, practically all from the sophomore class. The standard time limits were set empirically so that the fastest student in each group tested could almost but not quite complete each test. The subjects were directed to work rapidly and consistently, but not to sacrifice accuracy for speed. Each reader was allowed to work on a test until the experi-mentally determined standard time had elapsed; at which point, he was interrupted and a line drawn across the page below the last item attempted. Instructions were then given to complete the test, and when the last item was finished the total time required for the whole examination was recorded.
Three scores were derived from the data: (1) Number of items done correctly in standard time; (2) number of items attempted in standard time; (3) total time taken to complete the test. The number of items done correctly in unlimited time tended to yield a very restricted range of scores and a distribution that deviated markedly from the normal. This score, therefore, was not employed in the statistical comparisons.[6][7]
Increasing your reading speed
In 1925, William S. Gray noted that it may be possible to increase one's reading speed, by training the eyes to increase span of recognition, or the amount of information an individual can process in a single glance, one could significantly increase his reading speed. While the prospect of reading at an increased speed undoubtedly sounds advantageous to many, research shows that there is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy, in other words, comprehension. So, naturally the only way to effectively increase your reading speed is by familiarizing yourself with the language. As Arthur Jensen has noted, “The techniques of raising intelligence per se in the sense of g, probably lie more in the province of the biological sciences than in psychology and education.”. Some speed reading courses claim that we can use our peripheral vision to simultaneously read large segments of a page, perhaps even a whole page, instead of one word at a time. However, such a process is not biologically or psychologically possible.[8]
References
- ↑ Romanes, George. Mental Evolution in Animals. ISBN 1-108-03787-9. Search this book on
- ↑ Quantz, J. O. (1897). "Problems in the psychology of reading". The Psychological Review: Monograph Supplements. 2 (1): i–51. doi:10.1037/h0092985. ISSN 0096-9753.
- ↑ Huey, Edmund B. (1901). "On the Psychology and Physiology of Reading. II". The American Journal of Psychology. 12 (3): 292–312. doi:10.2307/1412280. JSTOR 1412280.
- ↑ Tinker, Miles A. (1955). "Prolonged reading tasks in visual research". Journal of Applied Psychology. 39 (6): 444–446. doi:10.1037/h0041553. ISSN 1939-1854.
- ↑ Tinker, M. A.; Paterson, D. G. (1928). "Influence of type form on speed of reading". Journal of Applied Psychology. 12 (4): 359–368. doi:10.1037/h0073699. ISSN 1939-1854.
- ↑ Tinker, M. A. (1939). "Speed versus comprehension in reading as affected by level of difficulty". Journal of Educational Psychology. 30 (2): 81–94. doi:10.1037/h0055985. ISSN 1939-2176.
- ↑ Brysbaert, Marc (2019). "How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate". Journal of Memory and Language. 109. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047. Unknown parameter
|article-number=ignored (help) - ↑ Brozo, W. G.; Johns, J. L. (1986). "A Content and Critical Analysis of 40 Speed Reading Books". Journal of Reading. 30 (3): 242–247. JSTOR 40032813.
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