Figures for reading speed get quoted freely, in scientific writing as much as in advice about study and productivity, and the numbers tend to be generous. Brysbaert went back to the measurements: a hundred and ninety studies of silent reading, covering eighteen thousand five hundred and seventy-three participants. What does the pooled estimate say?
Slower than the usual claims. Average silent reading for adults in English comes to two hundred and thirty-eight for non-fiction and two hundred and sixty for fiction. predicts the difference, since non-fiction uses longer words. , across seventy-seven studies and almost six thousand participants, averages one hundred and eighty-three.
The numbers come from pooling rather than from a new experiment. The analysis covers a hundred and ninety studies and eighteen thousand five hundred and seventy-three participants. From it, the average silent reading rate for adults in English is estimated at two hundred and thirty-eight words per minute for non-fiction and two hundred and sixty for fiction.
The difference between the two is not about interest or ease. It can be predicted by taking into account the length of the words, with longer words in non-fiction than in fiction. Both estimates are lower than the figures often cited in scientific and popular writings, and the review goes through the reasons those overestimates arose.
Reading aloud is slower still, at an average of one hundred and eighty-three words per minute across seventy-seven studies and five thousand nine hundred and sixty-five participants. Rates are also lower for children, for older adults, and for readers with English as a second language.
Two further findings matter for how the number should be used. The rates are in line with maximum , so they do not require assuming any reading-specific language processing. Within each group and task there are also reliable individual differences that are not yet fully understood. For silent reading of English non-fiction most adults fall between a hundred and seventy-five and three hundred words per minute. For fiction the range is two hundred to three hundred and twenty.
wat. About two hundred and forty words a minute for non-fiction. Most of the impressive figures you have read about reading are too high.
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The rates line up with the maximum speed at which people can listen, which means reading does not need any processing machinery faster than speech.
How do we know?
A review and meta-analysis in the Journal of Memory and Language, pooling a hundred and ninety silent reading studies and seventy-seven oral reading studies, and reviewing why the commonly cited figures run high.
What is still unknown
Within each group and task there are reliable individual differences that are not yet fully understood. Most of the data are for English, with other languages estimated by how many words they need for the same message.
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