Point well taken IntelSoldier I know I recall my son’s typing speed dropped radically when he was copying text as opposed to composing at the keyboard. Perhaps that is where I got the mistaken idea that reading was a speed limiting factor. How I worked speech speed into that equation, well, your guess is as good as mine. Actually your guess is probably better than mine.
I used to have serious troubles reading out loud because I was always ahead of what I was trying to say. I did will with note cards, outlines, and public speaking types of tasks in general, but any time I had to read something verbatim aloud, it was embarrassing and I sounded like a fool. Trouble was, I was always several sentences or paragraphs ahead of what I was verbalizing, but to continue talking, I’d have to scan backwards to find my place, which wasn’t always easy to do.
I worked my way through it, and now I have to modes: (1) very slow and deliberate, whereby I force myself to read one word at a time. This is inconvenient as I’m not generally able to inject context into my pronunciation. (2) I go off like a robot in a very monotone manner as I scan ahead, but at least I can vocalize contexts. I guess I should add a (3): (3) if I’ve pre-read what I’m to read, then I sound like a normal person reading.
I’m not one of those speed-reader folks, but I read considerably faster than I speak, and in my experience, nominally faster than most other folks that I work with day to day.
I’m surprised no one has posted Wikipedia’s take on this yet. Yeah, I know, but it’s often a reasonable place to start with an overview.
So if you trust the source, reading speed is faster for the average person. It’s not to the degree that we had expected based on personal experience, though, which makes sense.
You can turn that into an asset instead of a liability. Read one sentence, or one line, or whatever you can comfortably hold in your memory, with each glance at the page. Then, look away from the page and look at the audience while you’re saying it. Try to make eye contact with at least some of the people you’re talking to, scattered throughout the room. When you’re almost to the end of the fragment you’ve memorized, look down at the paper again, and grab another line.
How about talking rate by country or language?
For one thing, I think Brit actors talk much, much faster than their American counterparts. Check some BBC in America movies and dramas. (I will be be surprised if anyone disagrees with this.)
And I rather suspect that Spanish speaking people talk insanely fast. Sometimes I tune in to the Spanish channel on Cable just to enjoy the sounds of Spanish - even at a blue streak - and perhaps glean the sense of what’s going on. I’m not talking about scripted programs. Listen to off the cuff remarks of a Soccer commentator and they still talk at the speed of light.
People who speak foreign languages always speak faster than people who speak your own language, no matter what your own language is. Or at least, it always sounds that way. Thing is, folks speak fast in any language; it’s just that when you understand the language and are familiar with it, you don’t notice how fast it is. In particular, when you’re familiar with a language, you’ll mentally insert the spaces between words, even though they’re not present in the actual stream of sound.
Chronos, I can’t accept what your saying - respectfully so, I might add.
I can’t blame you for feeling the same about what I said, but the fact is, neither of us has offered any facts, so it’s an impasse.
I think this is because English is your native language (correct me if I’m wrong).
In fact, English is a stress-timed language, while Spanish is a syllable-timed language. Take the sentence:
CATS CHASE MICE
Each word is one syllable and stressed.
Now say:
the CATS are CHASing the MICE
It takes the same amount of time to say this, so you speed up the articles and the helping verbs.
Now try this:
the CATS’ll’ve been CHASing all of the MICE
We’ve gone from three syllables to 11, and yet, it takes the same amount of time to say the last sentence as the first.
A Spanish speaker will find it hard to understand that you’re talking in the future perfect progressive precisely because you speed up and reduce the helping verbs, articles, and qualifiers.
English, in fact, is more insanely fast, in that it speeds up at grammatical points.
A speed reading course’s first aim is to get you out of the habit of sub-vocalizing, which is probably the biggest limiter of reading speed. Many people, even if they don’t physically pronounce the words, mentally “say” them, and that limits them to somewhere around a very fast speaking rate for the individual. Some people get out of that stage of reading on their own, others get stuck there because they’re aural learners or for some other reason. Natural or trained fast readers don’t mentally pronounce words other than unfamiliar ones.
We’ve had threads on this board before about whether you “hear” anything when you read. Virtually every single person who says that they mentally pronounce words, or hear the dialog would probably also report a relatively low reading speed. (Someone more anal than me can feel free to correlate the reading speed and the “Do you ‘hear’ or ‘see’ what you read?” threads.) For what it’s worth, I don’t “hear” things when I read — even dialog is more concepts than words to me — and I read pretty darn fast; about 1,000 wpm. Like Exapno Mapcase said, I also take in every word on the page, though I’m not really conscious of that most of the time. Usually it’s a transparent process between the page and brain, but every once in a while I’ll note odd, fun, or unusually effective word choices and phrasing.
Linguistics studies also show that mental speech processing can be a limiting factor in reading speed. While we can comprehend speech that is much faster than normal conversation (somewhere around 500–600 wpm) listening is a fundamentally different process from seeing/reading. We are a lot better and faster at visual processing than we are at sound processing. This is true even if that sound is speech, which our brains give a much higher priority and are more optimized for decoding than normal sound.