Introduction
Read this sentence. If you are like most people, you heard it. An internal narration, in something like your own voice, pronounced the words as you read each word. That is subvocalization. This blog teaches you what is subvocalization, and how to reduce it to improve your reading speed.
What subvocalization is
Subvocalization is the pronouncing of words as you read. Place electrodes over the larynx of someone reading silently and you can detect electrical activity in the muscles used for speaking. Your muscles are articulating the words you hear.
As a child you were taught to pronounce everything aloud as you read i.e. to vocalize your readings. As a teenager, you learnt to suppress audible narration, leaving behind subvocalization.
Should we eliminate subvocalization?
The traditional case for reducing subvocalization runs like this. People speak at roughly 200 words per minute. If you silently pronounce every word you read, your reading speed is anchored by your speaking speed. Therefore, reducing subvocalization is important to increasing reading speed. This is true, but the conclusions that people should eliminate subvocalization is erroneous.
Subvocalization is important for comprehension. People who eliminate it demonstrate low levels of comprehension. The research suggests that subvocalizing key words in each sentence is essential to understanding. This is why the claims of reading speeds of over 1000 words per minute fall apart. People can rush their readings, but at the risk of severely impairing their understanding. Reading without a conceptual understanding of the words is only advisable in specific situations. For example, understanding the text is not a priority if you are proofreading a document for grammatical errors.
Reducing subvocalization
Skilled readers do not narrate text the way an audiobook does with every word fully sounded. Subvocalization is reduced tactically. Function words, which are simple words which express grammatical relationships between words, think of the "of"s and "the"s, are not subvocalized. Your brain can recognise those words without subvocalizing them because they are simple and common.
Reducing subvocalization lifts the ceiling on your reading speed. You are not confined to reading at the speed you speak. Reading at 300 to 400 words per minute becomes achievable.
How to train it
Try to only subvocalize content words. These are words which carry the meaning in a sentence. Take the sentence, ‘I went to the shop’. The key words are ‘went’ and ‘shop’. Subvocalize these words and try to take in the words ‘I’, ‘to’, and ‘the’ with your peripheral vision. You’ll notice that you can do this because these words are simple and common. The ten most common function words make up 24% of written English. Not subvocalizing them can have a dramatic effect on your reading speed. You can train reducing subvocalization on Lexo’s Chunking exercise or the Key Words exercise.
Reading speed control
Some texts deserve the full narration, e.g. statutes, poetry, mathematical proofs. Learning to speed read gives you the tool to adjust your reading speed to the text. If you need to slow down to fully narrate a text, you can. If you want to speed up, you can.
Speed reading gives you control over your reading by upgrading your reading skills. Exercise judgment on how to utilise your reading skills to efficiently get through your readings.