Quote:
Originally Posted by Salgueiros
So speed reading is not reading some of the text. Nothing we didn't know already...
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It's rather more complicated than that.
When we are taught to read we read each word from left to right as we do with each line of text. As we advance however we become skilled in acquiring some perspective as to what the passage is about, and this means we can now predict what words are likely to occur and recognise them by their distinctive shape and length. When we reach this stage our eyes no longer move from word to word, but jump randomly all over the printed page extracting the meaning of the whole text from
recognising word shapes and building the understanding of the text from doing this. Given that the processes involved in perception seem to form a large part of this, then this is far removed from being a simple mechanism.
The process was understood by experiments using special apparatus which allowed the tracking of a reader's eyes as they moved over the page.