Reading isn’t just about seeing the words – you need to comprehend them to build up a picture about what the text means. This means that if a reader doesn’t understand the meaning of a word or phrase, there’s no chance of backtracking through a sentence to try and figure it out in context. Moreover, RSVP programs remove the opportunity to make reverse saccades and refixations. In a recent article (pdf), researchers argued that for this to be true, it would mean that your brain effectively stopped processing information when you make an eye movement, which we know not to be the case. This implies that the time spent making saccades is wasted time – but it’s not. This technique is supposed to make readers more efficient because they spend less time moving their eyes across words. Rather than getting readers to move their eyes across lines of text, the words are presented individually, at a constant speed, faster than the natural reading rate. A number of programs say they can bump reading speeds up as high as 1,000 words per minute, using variations of a technique called rapid serial visual presentation, or RSVP. The fact that we often jump back in a sentence to reprocess difficult words poses a problem for speed reading apps. For the most part, we tend not to take any information in when a saccade is actually being performed, although we’re still processing information about the words we’ve just seen. These refixations tend to happen more frequently when a text is difficult to read or if the reader isn’t fluent. However, we also sometimes make reverse saccades, jumping back to previous words in the sentence. You may think reading is a serial process – we move our eyes from one word to the next, from left to right (in English). Each movement takes about 30 milliseconds and each fixation lasts around 250 milliseconds. The movements are known as saccades and the pauses are called fixations.įor a typical, fluent reader, the average size of a saccade is about eight letters. Instead, they make a series of short, sharp jumps, skipping over a few characters before briefly landing on a word. Read over that sentence again, and think about how your eyes scan across the words. It was a French ophthalmologist, Louis Émile Javal, who first described the patterns of movement during reading in 1878. The human eye movement system is central to our reading ability. But do they actually work? First, we need to understand how we read. Jones runs training courses teaching speed reading, recall and concentration techniques and there are numerous speed reading apps that have appeared on the market over the past few years. Just 25 minutes and 31 seconds later, she was finished – which equates to a reading rate of around 3,700 words per minute. In July last year, six-time speed reading champion Anne Jones sat down to read Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman.
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