“Language at the Speed of Sight” (Mark Seidenberg):
"The number of people who understand the relevant research—which now includes you—is far smaller than the number of people who would like to read a lot faster.
The deeper problem common to all such methods is that they have the relationship between eye movements and reading skill backward. They assume that reading skill results from efficient eye movements. Train your eyes to take in more information or read without having to move the eyes at all, and you will be a better, faster reader. However, efficient eye movements are the result of becoming a proficient reader, not the cause. People who acquire the knowledge and experience that underlie skilled reading do indeed move their eyes with greater efficiency, producing increases in reading speed. But we don’t achieve this by practicing how to move our eyes.
A championship Scrabble player’s orthographic expertise has a different character from a skilled reader’s. Readers pick up orthographic statistics incidentally as a by-product of reading, whereas Scrabble expertise results from extended deliberate practice, like other specialized talents such as eating the most hot dogs in ten minutes. Readers need to know the meanings of words; Scrabble players do not. Knowing that ninety-five legal Scrabble words can be formed from the letters APTYKLI is helpful in playing the game; readers, in contrast, have to recognize patterns as particular words, not discover words in randomly ordered strings. Elite Scrabble players’ expertise is a function of the amount of Scrabble-specific practice (studying word lists, analyzing previous games, time spent in competitive play) rather than general factors such as vocabulary size or verbal ability. Scrabble skills do not carry over to reading, but expert players are better at making lexical decisions for words presented vertically, as they can be in the game.
The other orthographic experts are children who compete in spelling tournaments: “bees.” They too engage in thousands of hours of deliberate practice memorizing the spellings of words. I have not found any studies of the impact of this knowledge on the children’s reading or academic performance. The effects could be a little weird. Winning turns on knowledge of obscure words in the very long tail of the frequency distribution, such as STICHOMYTHIA and NUNATAK. Many of these are technical terms or borrowed from other languages, which certainly alters the statistics of the contestants’ Big Orthographic Data. Unlike Scrabblists, spelling champions reportedly know the meanings of many of the words and have studied etymology and word formation (morphology). They read dictionaries, not lists of six-letter words containing J, K, or Q, suggesting that the knowledge they acquire has greater utility.”
Can your perceptual system take in more words?
The narrowness of the perceptual span seems like a vision problem that should be fixable. Corrective lenses allow people to see letters more clearly in the fovea. What about correcting the poor acuity outside the fovea? Some masters of the eye-tracking methodology have tried it. The technique is called parafoveal magnification (parafovea refers to areas adjacent to the fovea). The trick is to compensate for the decrease in acuity by increasing letter sizes in proportion to distance from the current fixation. The displays they used are illustrated in Figure 4.3. The arrow indicates the current fixation. The lines represent how the display changed on each fixation as one line of text was read. The researchers also varied window size from seven to twenty-one slots using the letter-replacement method from Figure 4.1. The main question was whether the perceptual window would be wider when the letters in the parafovea were larger than normal.
The subjects, who were college students, rapidly adapted to reading with parafoveal magnification. Surprisingly, the manipulation had very little impact, positive or negative. Reading times with magnification closely matched those for normal text, and comprehension was equally good. Again it was window size that had the big effect: with the window reduced to only seven normally displayed letters, reading times were seriously slowed.
This finding confirms that information outside the fovea is useful even though it is imprecise. This experiment shows that the limits on the width of the span are cognitive as well as visual. Under normal conditions, the drop-off in retinal acuity is the major limiting factor. That is the reality of everyday reading. Technology can’t compensate much because only a few of those bigger letters fit within the perceptual span. Moreover, the magnified letters have little impact because of limitations on how much information can be processed at a time. Reading is a demanding task. The amount that we can see on a fixation seems pretty well matched to how rapidly we can make sense of it. Magnifying letters in the periphery is ineffective because we’re already wrapping chocolates as fast as we can.”