Lots of people can read quickly and then there are readers who have learned techniques known as speed reading. This allows a reader to get through printed text at a much higher than normal rate, sometimes as fast as several hundred words per minute. A collaboration between researchers in Italy and Spain has demonstrated that one particular speed-reading technique has a tradeoff in comprehension at that kind of reading rate when it is sustained at more than 250 words per minute for five minutes or more.
Francesco Di Nocera of the Department of Psychology at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy and colleagues there and in Spain have looked at Spritz an app that allows one to speed read by offering rapid serial visual presentation. They tested readers’ comprehension of a short piece of text when they used Spritz to read at rates of 250, 350, and 450 words per minute.
Given that comprehension is the main goal of reading not simply the need to scan through a stream of words, the team suggests that users should be made aware that speed reading for five minutes or more even at just 250 words per minute for most users will lead to a deficit in their understanding of what they have “read”. Such an insight might also be worth noting among those people using Spritz and similar software on their smartphone or other mobile device who have dyslexia, visual impairment, and other problems so that those people are fully aware of the limitations they might face in understanding a piece of text. Given that the app has been used to address several reading difficulty issues by educators, this work could provide a foundation for improving its use by lots of disparate readers.
Ricciardi, O., Calvani, G., Palmero, F., Juola, J.F. and Di Nocera, F. (2020) ‘Speed reading using Spritz has a cost: limits when reading a short text’, Int. J. Human Factors and Ergonomics, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp.161–173.
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