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Subvocalization

Most normal readers never stopped reading out loud; they just got quieter and quieter and quieter. If you watch closely, you can see most people moving their lips when they read, and if not their lips then at least their jaw and throat. This is because they are still using the same basic procedure as when they read out loud. This is called "Subvocalization." They are hearing the words "silently in their head." This is not all bad. If you are going to read "The Raven," by Edgar Allen Poe, while waiting for the bus, I suggest you subvocalize, unless you want to receive some odd looks! For goodness sake, don't speed read the Raven! At least half the fun of that poem is the way the words make rhythms and practically dance when read out loud. Speed reading doesn't capture the sound of the words, which is why things like poems and plays really aren't well suited to speed reading. For most of your reading you don't need to know how the words sound, but what the words mean.

This is a hot topic in education. Some people favor phonics, a way to teach reading based on the sounds of words. Others favor whole language, a method that treats a word as a single unit and tries to teach readers to use these units. The truth is that both are very important. Phonics is a very useful intermediate step in learning to read for many people. "Sounding words out" is a big help at a certain stage of reading development. Unfortunately, English is poorly designed for the sounding things out. Using the phonics system the word "phonics" would be pronounced "Pu-hon-iks." This isn't too helpful.

The reason for the disagreement is that both camps are right in some areas. Think of it this way, when you were very young you didn't even know the difference between a curve and a straight line. Later this difference became so clear that now you might have trouble remembering it as something you had to learn. You also learned to put curves and lines together in various ways to make designs called letters. This too was learned so well that you probably don't think of letters as being made up of anything, but they are, aren't they? Letters are just groups of lines and curves. So it is with words.

Written words are made up of letters, but spoken words aren't. Spoken words are made up of sounds, not letters. Most sounds have more than one letter combination that can represent them. Think about the sound of to, too, and two. One sound is represented by three different letter combinations. It also works the other way around; most letter combinations make different sounds based on what they come before or after. A famous example is "ghoti." Pronounce "gh" the same way you pronounce it in "laugh." Say "o" the way you say it in "women." The "ti" is the same as in "action." Put these together now: "gh" from "laugh", "o" from "women", "ti" from "action". What do you get? Fish. The sound of a word can be very different from the sounds associated with the letters we use to write that word. This is why phonics is both good and bad, and the same goes for "whole language." There really isn't one good answer.

To apply this to speed reading, most people never learn to do much more than recognize written words. Once they recognize a word they speak it, and then go on to the next one, and they call this reading. All too often this is where people stop. The reason most people only read at about two hundred words per minute is that this is their speaking speed. The habit of reading the word and "hearing" it, and the mistake of thinking you have to hear a word to understand a word, these things hold down your reading speed. Spoken words are made of sounds, and if you are talking to someone then the speed of speech is about as fast as you can go. But when you read you are working with written words. Why bother hearing them? You can SEE them!

How does the drill fight sub-vocalization? The counting is what does the trick. The part of your brain that hears noises on the outside is the same part of your brain you use to "hear yourself talk silently in your head." By counting out loud while doing the drills, you keep that part of your brain busy, so there is no way it can "hear" the words on the page. This forces you to find the meaning of the words directly by seeing them. Normally you would see the letters, convert the letters to sounds, hear the word in your head, and then get the meaning. Counting out loud forces you to short circuit this process and get your meaning from the sight of the words. This is why you must count out loud at first, to keep that sound processing part of your brain occupied, to force you to get meaning from the sight of the words instead of their sounds. This is also part of the reason for starting slowly. When you learn new information, you want to use methods that are comfortable for you. But when you learn a new method, you should use information that is comfortable. This is what some people call separating content from process; separating the what from the how. Speed reading is a new "how", a new way to read, so it only makes sense to use an easy or comfortable "what" for your speed reading drills. If you reduce the speed pressure, then the "what" of your reading becomes easier. This lets you learn to read by sight instead of by sound. Reading sixty words a minute is easy, even while counting out loud. The speed will come quickly after you learn to read by sight. You will start with solid success, reading by sight at slow speeds, then move to faster speeds to finally "break" the sound barrier. Remember, you will only count out loud during drills, and only until you think counting "in your head" will do the trick. No one else can decide for you when to change from out loud to "in your head". In time, as you practice the drill and use the method on your normal reading, the counting will fade into the background, until you aren't aware of it at all. The counting is a short term way to break the habit of subvocalizing.