i call selection bias on this. he keeps saying studies have shown. i always use that terminology when i want to prove a point, and i want to shut up the other side without arguing
the linked documents are the book the causes of high and low reading[1]. and the paper by rayner[2]
i don't really have access to most papers, but from my quick search on google scholar i'd say there are way more than a handful of papers on reading comprehension at high speeds.
also, don't forget that you can train the human brain like a muscle. so it's not surprising that reading comprehension on untrained people immediately suffers when you move outside of their comfort zone.
another thing that's ignored is what graeme mentioned about subvocalization. a lot of the speed reading practice aims to remove subvocalization from your reading process. it's the crap they teach us in school.
if you ask me these are all hacks though. our encoding ie. language and text is incredibly inefficient. in theory chinese characters are a much better at encoding, ie. have higher entropy than our english language.
ideally someone would throw a couple million at me, and a couple of neuroscientists, and nano engineers, and we build you the ultimate reading hack(team applications welcome :P)
> my quick search on google scholar i'd say there are way more than a handful of papers on reading comprehension at high speeds.
The Rayner paper is what is called a review. It has 19 pages of references to hundreds of papers on the topic that Rayner has read so the nonexpert does not have to.
Generally, reviews are much better sources than individual papers for the non-expert to read because the author has gone through the literature to understand the feuds and arguments and how they have played out. In my field, I regularly have people try to send me papers that were thoroughly thrashed as wrong over a decade ago. That is generally what happens when a non-expert tries to dive into the primary literature blindly without understanding the general framework and consensus that a good review provides.
All that said, it is very hard for a non-expert to tell whether a review is good or not. It is a conundrum.
the linked documents are the book the causes of high and low reading[1]. and the paper by rayner[2]
i don't really have access to most papers, but from my quick search on google scholar i'd say there are way more than a handful of papers on reading comprehension at high speeds.
also, don't forget that you can train the human brain like a muscle. so it's not surprising that reading comprehension on untrained people immediately suffers when you move outside of their comfort zone.
another thing that's ignored is what graeme mentioned about subvocalization. a lot of the speed reading practice aims to remove subvocalization from your reading process. it's the crap they teach us in school.
if you ask me these are all hacks though. our encoding ie. language and text is incredibly inefficient. in theory chinese characters are a much better at encoding, ie. have higher entropy than our english language.
ideally someone would throw a couple million at me, and a couple of neuroscientists, and nano engineers, and we build you the ultimate reading hack(team applications welcome :P)
[1]: http://books.google.de/books/about/The_Causes_of_High_and_Lo...
[2]: http://csi.ufs.ac.za/resres/files/Rayner%20(1998).pdf