> When you're reading a book, you don't sit there and say, "Well, what does that word mean? What does that word mean?" After many sightings of the words in your vocabulary, your recall is immediate and very, very good.

But there's still ‘inner speech’, which appears to slow down meaning recall. It seems to be a habit of many people, although I don't have hard data to support this. I've heard that unlearning sub-vocal reading in favor of visual reading helps increase reading speed and remember the information. Haven't had much success with this myself so far, it needs some patience.

(I suppose phonetic writing system also adds to the problem. How cool it would be if you could read the meaning from symbols, instead of doing letter combination matching.)