Most Comprehensive Review To Date Finds The Average Person ’s Reading Speed Is Slower Than Previously Thought

By Matthew Warren You should take just under two-and-a-half minutes to finish reading this blog post. That’s going by the findings of a new review, which has looked at almost 200 studies of reading rates published over the past century to come up with an overall estimate for how quickly we read. And it turns out that that rate is considerably slower than commonly thought. Of the various estimates of average reading speed bandied around over the years, one of the most commonly cited is 300 words per minute (wpm). However, a number of findings of slower reading rates challenge that statistic, notes Marc Brysbaert from Ghent University in Belgium in his new paper released as a preprint on PsyArxiv.  Brysbaert searched for all studies measuring reading rates in participants aged between 17 and 60 and in languages that use the Latin alphabet. The exact nature of the studies varied a lot: for example, in some, participants had to read a long passage before answering multiple choice questions about the text, while in others they read single sentences while their eye movements were measured. But Brysbaert included only those studies in which participants read for fun or comprehension, and excluded others that require memorization or other challenges. Altogether, he found 190 suitable studies conducted between 1901 and 2019, collectively involving 17,887 participants.  The average reading rate across all these studies turned out to be just 238 wpm – much slower than the popular...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cognition Educational Reading Source Type: blogs