does "sub-vocalizing" mean "hearing the word in your head"?
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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Yes, I read at talking speed / reading aloud speed because that's effectively what I'm doing in my head. Reading it aloud, to myself, using my internal monolog.
You mentioned reading theory. Some styles of text are just hard to read and it takes practice to get fast. I had to read a lot of scientific papers and immerse myself in the concepts and lingo before I could parse through them quickly. It might make sense to just read theory as slow as you need to to absorb the concepts and get comfortable.
As for subvocalizing, I think I would draw a distinction between speaking the words in your head and hearing the words in your head. When I speak the words in my head I find that it slows me down, probably because it engages the speech production part of my brain too much. But even when I stop speaking the words in my head and just scan my eyes across the text, I still hear the words in my head in a more passive way. And it's strange, because if I heard real audio at that speed it would sound weird, but when it's just in your head somehow it feels normal. You're not having to actually parse a real audio signal, your imagination is just ghosting over the sounds of the words as they enter your brain.
Maybe I would read even faster if I stopped hearing words entirely, I don't know.
I will say that subvocalization literally is reading aloud to yourself. Your larynx flutters when you subvocalize and so iirc the current theory is that it's a way of promoting comprehension and retention because you are processing it through both audio and visual centers of the brain