Just saw this app called ReadQuick, which lets you read one word at a time and purports to increase your reading speed. Can it actually do that?
When you read normal text, it feels like your eyes are moving smoothly from the left of the page to the right. That’s not actually the case. You actually make a series of jerky movements across the page with lots of stops (called fixations) and jumps (called saccades). If you want to creep someone out, sneak up on them while they’re reading and watch their eyes. You’ll see fixations and saccades in action. During a saccade, you don’t encode any new information (it’s like you’re blind for that fraction of a second). Each fixation takes in about 8-9 letters at a time, which translates to about a word and a half on average in English. When you make a saccade to the next word, you often skip over little words.
Traditional speed reading programs train you to make bigger saccades (thus skipping over more information on the page, which you don’t encode so your comprehension usually goes down), shorter fixations, and fewer reverse saccades (from right to left), which you often do when you don’t understand something.
ReadQuick could potentially solve the problem with skipping information when you make bigger saccades, because everything is presented in the same place and this eliminates the need to make saccades at all. This might also speed up reading since you don’t have to take the time to move your eyes to the position of new words, they come to you in a sense. I’m not so sure about their claims of increased comprehension, though. The limitation here is in your ability to perceive and attend to words presented rapidly. Your ability to associate what you’re reading with information you already know is also limited, so your long-term retention of what you’re reading might also suffer.
This is an interesting idea. I’m not an expert on reading, but a quick google scholar search reveals that words presented using the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm (which is essentially what ReadQuick is) does increase reading speed. I can’t tell if it has any impact on reading comprehension, however.
Bottom line: yes, this can increase your reading speed. Plus, with the built-in social media functions, it will also allow you to brag about your fast reading to your friends.
Memory & Cognition Blog 
My understanding was that saccades help to sort of prime your comprehension for what’s coming so that fewer “down the garden path” mistakes are made. Is that not true?
There is research that suggests that RSVP paradigms are better tolerated if they have pauses for punctuation and phrase breaks. These pauses may give you time to form mental representations of the phrase structure in order to avoid garden path errors. I wouldn’t be surprised if saccades accomplish the same thing normally, just as you suggest.
Interesting idea, though I am curious how it is impacted by text complexity. Regressive saccades increase with text complexity, perhaps to maintain a useful level of comprehension. If the RSVP stream has an unfamiliar word then I would expect there to be an attentional blink, resulting in a number of following words to be missed!
I just found a fascinating artcile about this app, written by the author of the psycholinguistics text I’m teaching from this term. It’s long so I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t read it, but I thought I’d share since I remembered this blog post from several months back.
http://sites.sinauer.com/languageinmind/language01.html
Nice analysis of the app. Thanks, Jess!