i feel like for stuff like novels the vocalization & imagined richness of the world is kind of part of the point, and for technical material, grasping the ideas is by far going to be the limiting factor. (e.g., easy to spend an hour on 1 page of a math text.)
I can't read without subvocalization... I tried keeping my mind preoccupied with gibberish words and even thinking in a foreign language but a second voice chimes in with the words as I'm reading them in the background. This is also quickly mentally exhausting...
I don't consider myself a slow reader - as I speedread at 700~800wpm. The subvocalization merely happens by slurring words together as if playing a movie on x3 Fast Forward w/ sound. I'm not capable of seeing how it hurts the rate of reading. I could see voicing or actually reading aloud to slow down reading, but not this.
is there a website to test reading speed + comprehension? i'm thinking something w/ like an auto-generated story of fixed elements ("a pig and a horse visit the blue house on the hill", "a donkey and an ostrich cross the bridge over a river"), or maybe just a sampling of a large corpus of real text of similar level. you get timed on how long it takes you to read it + given a basic test to see if you actually absorbed it.
would be interesting to get some numbers, and also see if these (mythical?) non-subvocalizers really are faster.
i think i could see it maybe working, but i also feel like the words would be taking a whole new path through my brain. almost like a new language.
(reply up here because i guess i hit some hn karma limit on replying or something :/.)
Absolutely true! I don't read much math, but I have and my reading rate was much slower. There have been a few books over the past year that took me months to get through whereas most others took a matter of days. I read a few books in parallel though.