No correlation between articulation speed and silent reading rate when adults read short texts

Abstract

Silent reading often involves phonological encoding of the text in addition to orthographic processing. A question related to the phonological code concerns its richness: Is it an abstract code or does it contain information about the pronunciation of the visual stimulus? To answer this question, we investigated the relationship between articulation speed and reading speed, both for silent reading and reading aloud. We investigated whether people with fast articulation speed read faster than people with slow articulation speed. We recruited 94 participants, who in a Zoom session were asked to read short texts silently or aloud. They were also asked to talk about their lives and say the numbers 1-10 or the months of the year as quickly as possible. Finally, they completed an online vocabulary test and an author recognition test. Multiple regression analysis and cluster analysis showed that although the speed of reading aloud and silent reading correlated to some extent, they belonged to two different clusters. Reading aloud was mainly related to talking fluency and articulation speed, while silent reading was more related to vocabulary and knowledge of fiction authors. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the phonological code in silent reading typically does not contain articulatory information, although our data do not rule out the possibility that this may be the case for a small percentage of people or when people read more difficult texts.

The use of eye movement corpora in vocabulary research

“…Vasilev et al (2022) reported a reading rate of 165 words per minute (SD = 50) in participants reading short non-fiction paragraphs word-by-word. 1 This is slower than the typical reading rate for non-fiction texts (240 words per minute; Brysbaert, 2019), but still as fast as listening to speech (Brysbaert & Vantieghem, 2023).…”