What is the difference between vocalizing and subvocalizing

Take some stiff carton and cut a window into it. The window should be as wide as your page and as high as a single line of text.

Now move this piece of carton slowly down the page and force your eyes to remain fixed upon the window. Soon you will master whole lines without subvocalizing. When you are ready, you can even make a new window that will display two lines at a time. Subvocalization is not all about that inner little voice.

Your ears, tongue, lips, and larynx all play a role in the process. If you can distract these organs, you will limit your subvocalization. Distract your ears by listening to music when reading. Not loud, but rhythmic music or soothing melodies you barely register in the background.

Baroque music is the best. Keep the larynx occupied by humming softly along with the music. And the tongue, lips, and mouth? Chew gum. You may think of this as a corny tip but guess what: it works! There are quite a number of speed reading apps that can show you how to stop subvocalization. Almost all of these apps flash text onto the screen one word at a time and at a predetermined pace. There are many critics that condemn this type of app, but their condemnation has to do with its ability to increase comprehension and pace.

These apps can actually do a lot to help you to understand one word after the next without having the time or the ability to look at a specific word repeatedly or to subvocalize it. You might be using it for all the wrong reasons but, hey, it works! There are two types of subvocalization: low-vocalizers and high-vocalizers. Low vocalizers tend not to use the lips, throat and larynx as much during subvocalization.

They, therefore, tend to speak louder when they articulate a word or when they read aloud. Evidence suggests that constant subvocalization may reinforce bad habits such as when silently looking at an unfamiliar word and subvocalizing it incorrectly. This mistake tends to be repeated when the word is articulated aloud. Most of us learn much more efficiently when we employ our powerful visualization abilities.

Very experienced readers who have succeeded in reducing subvocalization can call up visual images of the text that they read rather than repeating the pronunciation in their heads.

This certainly is a strong indicator that less subvocalization can improve the acceleration and efficiency of your learning. The key here is to understand chunks of words or visually extract the concepts and ideas stored in them. The faster you decode them as a whole the less time is left to pronounce the words silently.

There is absolutely no evidence that subvocalization has any influence on comprehension. It does not help the reader to understand the material or to remember it. However, it does no harm either. People that cannot read more than — words per minute and those suffering from dyslexia are actually encouraged to subvocalize.

It helps them concentrate on the text they are processing and while subvocalization will not automatically promote comprehension, it will help struggling readers identify problematic words. It is recommended to quickly ask for an explanation of the meaning of a specific word should you be unable to subvocalize it. We all subvocalize and while there is much we can do to minimize it, it cannot be completely eliminated.

You will want to stop subvocalization because it slows down your pace without providing you with any compensating benefits such as better comprehension. The ability to read quickly will allow you to learn quickly and to cover more material in a shorter period of time. It is certainly well worth the effort to try and limit subvocalization. Well, thanks for getting this far. There are certainly many different approaches on how to stop subvocalization.

Do you have other tips? Please share them in the comments. If if you can stop saying the words in your head as you read, you will start reading faster almost immediately. This all happens fast: a skilled reader can read about to words per minute. Speeding up this process while retaining accuracy is almost impossible, she said.

Mental readers generally read at approximately words per minute. Auditory readers read at approximately words per minute. Visual readers read at approximately words per minute. Proficient readers are able to read — wpm without compromising comprehension. A normal rate for learning is wpm, and for comprehension it is wpm.

Speed reading is normally done at a rate of around wpm. Anything above wpm means sacrificing comprehension, although this varies from person to person. Once you hit a certain number of words per minute while reading probably around , comprehension breaks down and working memory gets overloaded. A person who reads slowly may also have problems with reading comprehension, which is the ability to understand and remember the material read.

A slow reader generally reads words a minute or less. A fast reader can usually read words per minute. In Edfelt reached a breakthrough when he created an electrically powered instrument that can record movement. He concluded that newer techniques are needed to accurately record information and that efforts should be made to understand this phenomenon instead of eliminating it. Subvocalization is commonly studied using electromyography EMG recordings, [7] concurrent speaking tasks, [8] [9] [10] shadowing , [8] and other techniques.

EMG can be used to show the degree to which one is subvocalizing [7] or to train subvocalization suppression. Greater electrical activity suggests a stronger use of subvocalization. In concurrent speaking tasks, participants of a study are asked to complete an activity specific to the experiment while simultaneously repeating an irrelevant word. Participants who had undergone the concurrent speaking task are often compared to other participants of the study who had completed the same activity without subvocalization interference.

If performance on the activity is significantly less for those in the concurrent speaking task group than for those in the non-interference group, subvocalization is believed to play a role in the mental processing of that activity.

This ensures that the difference in performance between the two groups is in fact due to subvocalization disturbances and not due to things such as task difficulty or a divide in attention.

Shadowing is conceptually similar to concurrent speaking tasks. Instead of repeating an irrelevant word, shadowing requires participants to listen to a list of words and to repeat those words as fast as possible while completing a separate task being studied by experimenters. Techniques for subvocalization interference other may also include counting, [9] [10] chewing [12] or locking one's jaw while placing the tongue on the roof of one's mouth.

The exploration into the evolutionary background of subvocalization is currently very limited. There is however hope for exciting new discoveries in the near future. The little known is predominantely about language acquisition and memory. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that the development of subvocalization is related to modular aspects of the brain. The most lucrative evidence for the mind having modules for superior function is the example that hours may be spent toiling over a car engine in an attempt to flexibly formulate a solution, but, in contrast, extremely long and complex sentences can be comprehended, understood, related and responded to in seconds.

Subvocalization is a topic that has much to be discovered and when inquiring as to what structures mediate this process alone, it is safe to say that it is not just one part of the brain, and that no one test will uncover this completely. Studies often use event-related potentials ; brief changes in an EEG electroencephalography to show brain activation, or fMRIs.