An assessment of two extraordinary speed-readers

An assessment of perceptual and comprehension skills was made on two speed-readers from the American Speedreading Academy who had achieved extraordinary rates of reading. Three experiments were conducted: (1) measurement of perceptual extent for briefly exposed single letters, (2) identification of words within paragraphs under controlled viewing, and (3) text comprehension. The performance of the two speed-readers on the first two tasks was indistinguishable from that of normal readers, although both speed-readers exhibited greater guessing tendencies. On the text comprehension task, the speed-readers were given three opportunities to read a college text and receive an exam given to college students over the same material. Both speed-readers read the text at rates between 15,000 and 30,000 words/min. However, both speed-readers would have failed the exam on each occasion. It was concluded that the only extraordinary talent exhibited by the two speed-readers was their extraordinary rate of page-turning.