Oh man. I’d go higher. Especially compared to vocalizing at “storytelling pace.”
I remember a while back being surprised to learn that there are readers who process language phonographically as opposed to orthographically, even when silent-reading. That is, they might read in their minds at the same pace that they speak, or “subvocalize”—reading aloud in everything except for producing the sounds. It was a dinner-party-grade conversation, not an academic-grade one, but once somebody talked to me about that distinction I’d notice people mouthing along to what they were reading—and it made sense why that was slower.
I’m not up on the details, but I remember an estimate in the 150-200wpm range for reading out loud. A little north of that for silent reading with subvocalization, and comfortably in the 400-600wpm range for skilled silent readers in an orthographic mode. And then the whole “speed reading” crowd clocking in faster, but at significant cost to comprehension. The general idea being that skilled orthographic readers can “chunk” entire words and phrases into larger visual units that they can parse all at once.
Looking for references now this is the best I can find:
I remember a while back being surprised to learn that there are readers who process language phonographically as opposed to orthographically, even when silent-reading. That is, they might read in their minds at the same pace that they speak, or “subvocalize”—reading aloud in everything except for producing the sounds. It was a dinner-party-grade conversation, not an academic-grade one, but once somebody talked to me about that distinction I’d notice people mouthing along to what they were reading—and it made sense why that was slower.
I’m not up on the details, but I remember an estimate in the 150-200wpm range for reading out loud. A little north of that for silent reading with subvocalization, and comfortably in the 400-600wpm range for skilled silent readers in an orthographic mode. And then the whole “speed reading” crowd clocking in faster, but at significant cost to comprehension. The general idea being that skilled orthographic readers can “chunk” entire words and phrases into larger visual units that they can parse all at once.
Looking for references now this is the best I can find:
https://theamericanscholar.org/reading-fast-and-slow/
But I wonder where the speed reading conversation intersects with this notion out of Caltech that we “live at 10 bits per second”:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42449602