Factors That Influence Reading Speed

Reading is a complex task involving visual sensory input, accurate eye movements, and higher cognitive aspects of comprehension. Reading involves processing of perceptual and linguistic information and requires participation of the motor system. The motor system comes into play through eye movement control and sometimes through manual control (e.g., use of a mouse in scrolling through computer text or use of a handheld magnifier to scan across a line of text). Eye-movement control imposes a ceiling on reading speed because it is known that reading speeds measured with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), in which the need for eye movements is minimized, can be at least three times faster than eye-movement-based reading speed (cf. Rubin &

Cognitive and linguistic factors can influence reading speed in at least three ways. First, reading is slower for hard text than easy text (Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989, chapter 4). Second, context can make words more predictable and enhance reading speed. Studies have shown that reading speed is 15% to 100% faster for continuous sentences compared with strings of random words (Sass, Legge, & Lee, 2006). Third, the reader’s strategy affects reading speed. It goes almost without saying that perceptual factors can influence reading speed. Most people with low vision from eye disease read slowly and laboriously, even with magnified text.

Psychologists have long been interested in the question posed by Woodworth (1938) in his review of research on reading: "How much can be read in a single fixation?" The investigation of this question has a long history, dating back to some of the earliest research on reading. Cattell, in 1885 (summarized by Huey,