The RSVP technique finds its origins in a device called a tachistocope, which flashes images using a slide projector in rapid succession in order to help people improve their recognition speed. The words are fixed in the same spot, which eliminates the need for saccades – your eyes can remain in the same spot while the words change. These apps work by showing each word in a reading by itself in rapid succession.
#Spritz speed reading online serial
It’s the technique utilized by speed-reading apps like Spritz, Spreeder, and others, and it’s called Rapid Serial Visual Processing. So let’s move onto our third method – and this is the one that you guys requested I talk about the most. It seems that reading is inextricably tied to our auditory language processing capabilities, and trying to separate the two does more harm than good. Scientists have done studies where they try to have participants eliminate sub-vocalization – in some by, by playing a tone when these vocal chord signals were detected, in others, by having the participants hum aloud while reading – and in each case, comprehension went way down. NASA scientists even developed a tool to detect and measure these signals.
“There’s a lot of evidence that when people recognize words visually, they access the sounds of those words to understand them.”Įven if you’re not reading aloud, your brain sends signals to your vocal chords as you read. According to Elizabeth Schotter, author of some of the most recent research on speed reading: If you could somehow eliminate that sub-vocal speech, could you process text more quickly?Īgain, research shows that this is a tactic that’s unlikely to work. Additionally, text can’t be comprehended in the peripheral area of your visual range.Ī 1987 research paper on speed-reading reported only one correct answer out of 30 cases where a reader was tested on text further than 3 letter spaces from where they had fixated.Īdding these findings to what we already know about the size of the eye’s foveal area, the results are clear: Fixations are small, and you can’t comprehend text that doesn’t fall within or very near them.īut what about eliminating sub-vocalization? Some speed reading courses agree that you need to read the text in order to comprehend it, but your “inner voice” that essentially speaks what you’re reading is slowing you down.
However, that study didn’t have any measure of comprehension, and further studies have shown that good comprehension can only be had when readers follow the lines. Similarly, a 1962 study cited a speed reader who could attain a speed of 10,000 words per minute by making only 6 fixations per page, which were done in counterclockwise fashion around the page – apparently not following the lines of text at all. Some people have claimed that they’re even able to fixate on a page only once, taking a “mental snapshot” of the page and processing it all at once. Let’s start with the claim that speed readers can fixate on larger areas of the page. Rapid Serial Visual Processing – showing each word in succession, in the same spot.Eliminating sub-vocalization – suppressing the voice in your head that “speaks” what you’re reading.Enlarging the area of your fixations – essentially reading text in your peripheral vision.This week, I want to look at three commonly touted speed reading techniques, all of which claim they can circumvent or augment some part of this process in order to increase your reading speeds. In the first video in this series, we covered the science of how the reading process works – both how your eyes move and fixate on text, and how your brain constantly pauses to process the incoming information. Let’s continue on with our speed reading mini-series! If you buy through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission. I can't imagine that anybody in the field of reading research would buy into it.C.I.G. HENDERSON: Speed-reading has little more plausibility than other pseudoscience. But it suffers from the same problems as the original speed-reading: There's not enough time to consolidate information.ĬLAIM: Anyone can speed-read. RSVP is another way to avoid doing the hard work of reading. In the 1960s a teacher named Evelyn Wood sold a popular course. HENDERSON: Speed-reading has been around a long time. But people confuse skimming with reading and comprehension.ĬLAIM: This is a new-and-improved technology. Skimming is great for getting the gist of something, or for looking for a specific thing, such as a phone number in a list. If you have information coming in too fast, it overwrites what you just took in a second ago, so it doesn't go into memory.
Getting information into memory takes time. HENDERSON: Ultimately there are biological constraints on what we can do. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play
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