If you did, have you corrected the problem? I do the same thing and it slows down my reading speed by a whole lot. I want to fix this, so I am now turning to the superior knowledge and wisdom of fellow Dopers for a workable solution.
If you still do, like me, maybe you want to keep an eye on this thread 
Geez, I didn’t think it was possible to read without pronouncing the words. Whenever I tried, I never remembered the sentence I had just read.
Urban Though it may be slower, you may not to “correct” it. It may no be a bad thing.
I’m a visual artist, my reading is very visually oriented. When I read, it’s like a movie plays in my mind.
However, my friend who is an accomplished composer and sound designer, does in fact sound out each word in his head. The sound of each word and the meter and/or rythms of the are very important to him (whether poetry or prose). When he reads, it’s more like a radio play in his head – he “hears spoken word” and then pictures the images in his head.
We both have excellent retention of what we read. And yes, it does take him much longer to complete a novel.
I “hear” the words, but it’s not in realtime. It’s usually sped up and a bit “skippy” sounding, like fast-forwarding a VCR. I don’t see it as a problem. Not hearing the words seems like it would be even worse.
It depends on how involved I am. Right now, I’m hearing the words I’m typing–although I’m hearing them at the same rate I’m typing, and I’m a decently fast typist. But they sound normal.
On the other hand, when I read the first four Harry Potter books, I didn’t hear the words–I visualized what was going on.
I only mentally hear the words if I’m deliberately reading carefully and slowly, most of the time I read quite fast and although the words do enter my mind with some sort of vocal shape attached (a little like slortar describes, but oddly different in a way I can’t properly describe), there simply wouldn’t be time to subvocalise them or even imagine them as being spoken properly.
I don’t hear words when I read, I have a mental image of the content, almost like a movie.
Hearing the words that you read isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It just means your brain is geared more for auditory learning than visual or kinesthetic learning. However, if you’re finding that you’re having to mouth the words you read or that you read so slowly that you lose the word content before you reach the end of the sentence, chances are that your phonic decoding is not where it needs to be. Your best bet then is to check with a reading specialist (ask your local school district), get tested, and have them recommend a course of study and practice to recement those phonic rules in your head.
I say the words in my head. It takes me forever to read.
(Do)(You)(Pronounce)(Words)(Mentally)(When)(You)(Read?)
Yep. :o
Words do get sounded out in my head, but the volume depends on how fast I’m reading.
I don’t think it slows me down, but I haven’t timed my reading speed in more than a decade. The last time I kept track was in Grade 11, when the English teacher wanted to know how many pages of a novel we had read in class-- about 45 minutes. Most people were saying one or two, a couple had 10s and 20s. I had more than 100. Very boring novel though-- which tends to speed up reading time for me.
I read faster than almost anybody I know. This is not bragging - I’ve come to realize it’s some weird kind of brain glitch I have. I also have a near-photographic memory for the written word. And yes, I read “aloud” in my head, adding intonation and inflection (and sometimes accents as well.) It certainly hasn’t slowed my reading down any, although if I read aloud OUTSIDE my head, I stutter, because my eyeballs and brain are going way faster than my mouth is capable of going.
Former proofreader: I used to mentally pronounce the punctuation as well, and note the caps, c/lc, bold, itals…It ruined the pleasure of reading for a long time. I got over it, but I don’t really have any advice on how to stop mentally pronouncing the words.
Jayzus, Life, your whole post sounds eerily familiar, especially the stuttering when the mouth can’t catch up with the eyes. I always tried to avoid reading aloud in class, because I felt so unusually inarticulate. (Though I must say, perfecting the accents in my head can take quite a while.)
Barbarian, one or two pages in forty-five minutes?! That’s… alarming, to say the least. :eek:
I find when the book is boring, my reading speed goes way down. It might take me a week or more to read a book that I’m not into, as opposed to a day or two for a good, entertaining one of the same length. Pronouncing the words in my head is only a problem in cases like this, where the storyline itself is so uninteresting that I get distracted by the semantics. Otherwise, I see the same sort of mental movie going on that others have mentioned.
As for the OP: Well, er… I guess I’m not very helpful. Sorry. 
Yes, unfortunately. My reading is extremely slow–recently I timed myself to see how quickly I could finish a 350-page novel and it took me 16 hours over three days, which is almost 3 minutes per page (and this wasn’t even very heavy literature). When I poll friends, they usually tell me they take between 30 seconds and a minute per page. I’ve been trying to speed up my reading, but I don’t have any specific techniques. I just try to read a lot.
Although I have very good comprehension, it’s not really worth it if it takes me seemingly forever to finish the average book.
Thanks everybody. I am a fairly slow reader so I am looking for ways to speed up.
Charmian and phouka,
Okay, that makes sense, even though I am mainly a visual person occasionally I have some original scores running through my head. I can’t tell if I’m screwed up or not.
When I read; I’m usually having the story read to me in a lecture hall type setting, and am interacting with the people in the room about the story; sometimes not, sometimes just sitting and tiddling my thumbs and then coming back to the person reading.
Sometimes I get hungry or nervous, smell stuff and wander…
Sometimes the reader will ask everyone to move; at which point we all may go outside (hard to hear when it rains and stuff!). I will typically walk around asking various people about aspects of the story (at which point the sounds follows me holographically, sometimes even the presenter); or when the conversation is banal, I will start processing the symbolism three levels back to me actually being in bed where I’m reading the book in RL. There are typically times when the presenter and I are the only ones; at which point we will simultaneously be holding many paralell conversations in regards to the book while the presenter is reading the book. I read about 20 pages an hour like this, although if I really force the issue, sometimes the ‘presenter’ will let me hear it hyper-drive, but then I usually return back to my room; and the book ceases to keep my interest much longer…
-Justhink
Start mentally mumbling, just as if you are reading an article aloud to someone and wish to skip past one part to get to another. I was having to work a 46-hour week and juggle this with a long reading list at grad school, so learnt to change the scenes in my head into something similar to a video on double-speed e.g
becomes something along the lines of:
Anything that struck me as particularly meaningful or important got played at normal speed. A complicated name or pronunciation (I was reading a lot of translated Polish drama) just got skipped over fast. There were a lot of Dr. Murtzuhfrfrfrs or Old Woman Kwieslurhfrfrfrrs. Plus now that I have more time, I’ve gone back over everything I’d speed-read and was surprised to find that I’d actually got as much out of the text as I did once I’d taken more time
“learnt”?
Yes, I went to grad school and studied English. Bow to my mad language skillz!
No, I just understand them. I’m a very fast reader and like a few posters above when I really get going I stop “seeing” the words on the page and move into pictures. Although that’s with story telling books.
When I read technical books like some of my graduate level history books I have to read aloud to force myself to understand what’s being said sentence by sentence becaue they are so dense. I adopt a real nice educated British accent when I do so. Something from a 1930s movie.
“A Brief History of Time” however I found very easy to read and I did it in pictures like above.
You know one thing I did which might have really kicked this into high gear lately? (I read the 375 page “Antrax” in an afternoon. I was so sad, it was like gobbling up a really good peach cobbler without savoring the taste.) What I use to do a lot was census searching on microfilm readers. So I’d be looking through 80,000 to 100,000 names looking for everyone named Beauchamp, Johnson or McElroy. And when I first started I could only scroll so fast but eventually I got real good at it and could go really fast.
So Maybe that might help, have something where there’s absolutely no reason to read it since nothing’s going on, but you do have a reason to understand the words since they hide what you are looking for. And then again and again and again. I can’t tell you how many millions of names I’ve scrolled through. 400,000 in north Texas alone.