Reading speed, comprehension and eye movements while reading Japanese novels: evidence from untrained readers and cases of speed-reading trainees.

BACKGROUND: A growing body of evidence suggests that meditative training enhances perception and cognition. In Japan, the Park-Sasaki method of speed-reading involves organized visual training while forming both a relaxed and concentrated state of mind, as in meditation. The present study examined relationships between reading speed, sentence comprehension, and eye movements while reading short Japanese novels. In addition to normal untrained readers, three middle-level trainees and one high-level expert on this method were included for the two case studies. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: In Study 1, three of 17 participants were middle-level trainees on the speed-reading method. Immediately after reading each story once on a computer monitor, participants answered true or false questions regarding the content of the novel. Eye movements while reading were recorded using an eye-tracking system. Results revealed higher reading speed and lower comprehension scores in the trainees than in the untrained participants. Furthermore, eye-tracking data by untrained participants revealed multiple correlations between reading speed, accuracy and eye-movement measures, with faster readers showing shorter fixation durations and larger saccades in X than slower readers. In Study 2, participants included a high-level expert and 14 untrained students. The expert showed higher reading speed and statistically comparable, although numerically lower, comprehension scores compared with the untrained participants. During test sessions this expert moved her eyes along a nearly straight horizontal line as a first pass, without moving her eyes over the whole sentence display as did the untrained students. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: In addition to revealing correlations between speed, comprehension and eye movements in reading Japanese contemporary novels by untrained readers, we describe cases of speed-reading trainees regarding relationships between these variables. The trainees overall tended to show poor performance influenced by the speed-accuracy trade-off, although this trade-off may be reduced in the case of at least one high-level expert.

Neural activations correlated with reading speed during reading novels.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to measure neural activations in subjects instructed to silently read novels at ordinary and rapid speeds. Among the 19 subjects, 8 were experts in a rapid reading technique. Subjects pressed a button to turn pages during reading, and the interval between turning pages was recorded to evaluate the reading speed. For each subject, we evaluated activations in 14 areas and at 2 instructed reading speeds. Neural activations decreased with increasing reading speed in the left middle and posterior superior temporal area, left inferior frontal area, left precentral area, and the anterior temporal areas of both hemispheres, which have been reported to be active for linguistic processes, while neural activation increased with increasing reading speed in the right intraparietal sulcus, which is considered to reflect visuo-spatial processes. Despite the considerable reading speed differences, correlation analysis showed no significant difference in activation dependence on reading speed with respect to the subject groups and instructed reading speeds. The activation reduction with speed increase in language-related areas was opposite to the previous reports for low reading speeds. The present results suggest that subjects reduced linguistic processes with reading speed increase from ordinary to rapid speed.

Neural activation dependent on reading speed during covert reading of novels.

We measured the dependence of activation on reading speed with fMRI in a wide range that spanned two orders of magnitude. We used four trained subjects who were capable of a technique of rapid reading, and another four who were untrained, to investigate the neural mechanism during the covert reading of novels. This revealed that activation decreased for trained subjects during extremely rapid reading in the left superior and middle temporal gyri or near Wernicke's area, and in Broca's area. These results suggest that the trained subjects read sentences with fewer phonological processes. The decrease in activation might also be due to fewer semantic and syntactic processes, although the subjects understood the story lines in the novels.