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Hi,
I'm really interested in making faster the way of acquiring information through reading.
Done some reseach on the internet, and found out about this technique called speed reading. Unfortunately the majority of the materials regarding this are either tied to some
sort of payment form the user's side, or they are free of charge but not too seful.
I'm curious if anyone here has mastered speed reading, and how. Does it really work?
What is the comprehension and recall rate of the speed read material compared to
normal reading? There could be different approaches, but from what I've read, the key
is to turn off the "sub-vocalizing" that is the inner sound in the head, reading out loud the text. That is the point where I can't get at the moment. If I don't sub-vocalize, then I don't really understand the text.
Also, is it possible to speed read in another, learned language? (not bilingual)?
Thoughts?
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I've always thought speed reading was a least part scam. While you can glean the overall gist of a text by speed-reading it, unless you have eidetic memory you can't memorize the facts from it.
And you certainly won't enjoy reading a novel that way.
Focus on techniques that improve your reading speed, but don't promise 'speed reading' and you'll be best off.
BTW, the #1 free way to improve reading speed is to read. A lot. Every day.
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One thing I always hate is the way that the term "subvocalization" is misused in those speed reading things; they always seem to think the term means moving your lips and sounding out each word as you read, but that's not what the term means at all. You can be reading faster than you can speak and still be subvocalizing, and subvocalizing does not necessarily mean that your lips move.
The claim that subvocalization slows down your reading has no basis in any sound research. It's doubtful that non-deaf native speakers of any language would be able to read without subvocalizing at all, no matter how fast they read. The fact that almost everybody learns to speak well before they learn to read means that even if there is a large visual component to reading, it's just not going to be possible to *completely* break the connection between sound and language in the brain the way the speed-reading gurus claim you can.
(once again I have tried to write something I didn't think nest0r would completely disagree with but I haven't read all his articles so I probably failed.)
Edited: 2010-03-22, 4:31 pm
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I pretty much agree, y_t. ;p
To sum up and avoid pointing only to links:
From what I've gathered, there are parallel routes of visual<-->semantic, visual<-->phonetic, semantic<-->phonetic, and the visual<-->semantic aspect is different and stronger for kanji, but with kana and letters, i.e. phonograms, there are stronger mappings of sound and meaning. This means that while comprehension doesn't require the phonetic activation, it does occur in parallel and/or afterwards. In a study Dehaene participated in on 'subliminal convergence' of kanji and kana, there were suggestions that phonological activation occurs for kana even in the 'absence of awareness'. For kanji at least, it's just that it's not required as a prior mediator as thought in decades past before they started doing studies on logographs and deep dylsexia (Coltheart, et al.). Between what I've read of how people process letters and sublexical processes ("Science of Word Recognition", "Remarkable Inefficiency... ", "The Reading Brain"), I believe each letter requires individual serial processing, which are then converted to phonemes and the phonemes are blended or something like that. Even with the most common three-letter words. As one study put it, the order might be thought of as "graphemic parsing, graphophonemic conversion, phonemic blending." There was another study about the multiletter/serial thing as well.
But I think, especially from my own experience, the more familiar you are with those multiletter clusters, the less you need to rely on phonemic conversion or the faster it occurs to access meaning. That's why seemingly intuitive myths like that 'we read by word shape' occur. If you think of consciousness as having this working memory that allows us to 'rehearse' (articulatory rehearsal in the phonological loop--with strong connections to sensorimotor processes that are even stronger in deaf folks) information, it's like we're repeating this stuff louder and louder in our minds depending on our skills/volition, hence subvocalization, all the way up to moving our lips and the like. I think once you're comfortable in a language, this self-referential process is greatly reduced, but it's something that requires familiarity with the words and overall reading skills, in my estimation.
If you're trying to force this rather than letting it come naturally, it's a tricky situation, because you're essentially hamstringing yourself and reducing lexical access routes, given how the letter-sound/meaning thing works (i.e. if you've learned the written language by focusing on mapping sounds to phonograms). Better to focus on learning the language--in fact focusing more on subvocalization until you 'learn/master/dissolve' the process and overt self-representation is minimal, when you need to sacrifice comprehension for speed--and developing strategies at enhancing your working memory capacity by chunking and developing retrieval structures, etc. (see previously linked comments).
The rest is just reading strategies you'll pick up anyway--how much 'backlooping' of a text you need to process words, the eye's field of vision, typography/orthography, and how you make use of those constrained processes of fixations and saccades, understanding common collocations and sentence structures and the way information is presented...
I wrote this kind of in a jumble and my memory sucks, hopefully I didn't forget or contradict ideas I already had/read. Bleh. I'll be like ta121212 and blame first-language attrition from learning Japanese for any mistake I make. ;p
Edited: 2010-03-22, 8:21 pm
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If you want to tag on more vocab, please learn 速度 (そくど) in addition to that.
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There's a textbook called 速読の日本語, but there 速読 doesn't refer to the speedreading being talked about in this thread, but just reading something as fast as you can without stopping to look up words and such.
I'm one such deaf fellow 
I would like to confirm that I believe that I don't really sub-vocalize... at least as far as I understand it.
