I was a slow reader for a long time, and after going through several disappointing "Speed Reading" programs, I decided to research the topic more academically.
Here is some clips from Alice Krumian's 2000 dissertation and related research books:
"Professor Javal, a French physician and psychologist at the University of Paris, was one of the first researchers to note the actual character of the eyes' movement in reading. In 1878 he published the first account of systematic observations of eye movements during reading. His work stimulated other researchers to work on similar problems, and by 1908, when Huey published the first important book on the psychology of reading, a considerable amount of information had already been gathered. Huey acknowledged that Javal deserves more than anyone else the credit for making the initial discoveries in the field and for initiating the considerable number of later studies."
-Alice Krumian "Speed Reading"
"Some readers could read visually while whistling or doing other motor tasks that would hinder inner speech ... But although there is an occasional reader in whom the inner speech is not very noticeable, and although it is a foreshortened and incomplete speech in most of us, yet it is perfectly certain that the inner hearing or pronouncing, or both, of what is read, is a constituent part of the reading by far the most of people, as they ordinarily and actually read."
-W.B. Secor (pp. 117-118)
"The eye readily falls into a brief motor habit of a certain fixed number o f pauses per line, for a given passage, independently of the nature of the subject matter. And the ease of the formation of motor habits seems to be one of the characteristics o f rapid readers as contrasted with slower ones"
"The fact of innerspeech forming a part of silent reading has not been disputed, so far as I am aware, by anyone who has experimentally investigated the process of reading. Its presence has been established7 for most readers, when adequate tests have been made" (p. 117)
- E.B. Huey The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (1908)
"O'Brien (1926) discovered a high correlation between the ocular motor control and the comprehension of a passage.'The immaturity of the reader manifests itself in the large number of fixations per line and the narrowness of the visual span'·(p. 94). He went on explaining that just as pulse rate serves as a reliable measure of the heart bea4 so does eye movement serve as the external counterpart of the internal conscious process, i.e. reading efficiency. 'The widening of the visual span and the lessening of the duration of the fixation pause are the factors which serve as reliable indices of the growth in rate of reading" (p. 94)."
-Alice Krumian - Speed Reading
There's a lot more, but the research shows that accelerated reading speeds of around 2,500 words per minute are possible with substantial comprehension, through the elimination of subvocalization, the lessening of eye fixations and the increasing of one's eye span.
Taking the information from the research I conducted, I put it together into a six-week coursebook called, "learn to speed read". It's free to read and download on Google Books, Scribd, and my website: krismadden.com
The bibliography's about 20 pages long, at the back of the book, so if you're interested in reading more research on the topic that would be a good starting place.
Enjoy.
-Kris Madden