I read the other comments here before typing out this comment. As several of the comments say, distinguishing different varieties of speech as "dialects" rather than "languages" is often a matter of politics rather than a matter of linguistics. It happens that I was one of the Wikipedians who was active in updating the Wikipedia article "English language"[1] earlier this year so that it is now a "good article" by Wikipedia's article rating criteria. For years, there were all kinds of stupid edit wars on that article by editors who didn't bother to look up or read any sources, but when several Wikipedians agreed to look up sources together and check what the sources actually say, we reached consensus about how to improve the article. The main point about the English language is that it has a very large speech community with high mutual comprehensibility spread all over the globe. The spread around the globe came first from trade, migration, and colonization, but even after the British Empire dissolved, the spread of English has been maintained by telecommunications, travel, broadcasting, film, book publishing, study abroad, and the efforts of many national governments of non-English-speaking countries to promote knowledge of English through formal schooling and government administration. The majority of people who use English day-by-day now are not descendants of English settlers who live in the "inner circle" of English-speaking countries. When we consider that railroads, the telegraph, the telephone, voice radio broadcasting, passenger airplanes, and talking motion pictures were all invented in English-speaking countries, and were used in international communication as early for United States-to-Britain communication as for international communication between any other country pairs, it is not surprising that English has stayed remarkably homogeneous across the vast territory of the United States and has even stayed mutually comprehensible despite the political separation of the United States and Britain. Like the majority of my ancestors (I have only a little English ancestry, from which I gain my family name), most Americans are descended mostly from people who did NOT speak English when they arrived in North America, but who learned English to communicate with one another as residents of the United States. My two maternal grandparents were both born in Great Plains states of the United States, but their schooling (only primary schooling) was conducted entirely in the German language, and they learned English as a second language as native-born United States citizens to interact with neighbors.
There were earlier comments in this thread about Chinese. Absolutely, positively the different Sinitic languages are distinct languages, not mutually comprehensible, and it does violence to the English usage of the term "dialect" to refer to Mandarin and to Cantonese as "dialects" of Chinese. I speak Modern Standard Chinese fluently and have worked for many years as a Chinese-English interpreter. I have also studied Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Hakka (listed in decreasing order of proficiency). Mandarin and Cantonese are more distinct, in several respects, than English is from German or than French is from Spanish. Calling both Mandarin and Cantonese "dialects of Chinese" is simply a matter of the politics of China denying linguistic reality.
The distinctions among Sinitic languages as distinct languages apply even if you write them down in Chinese characters. Chinese characters still represent speech (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[2] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[3] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[4] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[5] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective.
I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp...
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie...
All Chinese speakers read the same script even if their spoken language is quite different.
That's an oversimplification. Chinese speakers who have not learned to read of course don't read any script. And in actual current usage, written Chinese is conformed to the speech patterns of the national standard language, Mandarin, and reflects the vocabulary and grammatical patterns of that language. Chinese characters still represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[1] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[2] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[3] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[4] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective.
I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie...
[4] http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm
Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts.
How you might write the conversation
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
Chinese characters still represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[1] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[2] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[3] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[4] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective.
Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie...
I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie...
I read quite a few books about speed-reading when I was a university student in the early 1970s, putting the techniques to the test while taking courses in linguistics, foreign languages, history of technology, and Japanese literature in English translation. There are a number of good books about how to improve reading skills, with various levels of credulity about "speed-reading" claims. After my own research and experience, I have to agree with the paragraphs in the article submitted here based on more recent research:
"Ronald Carver, author of the 1990 book The Causes of High and Low Reading Achievement, is one researcher who has done extensive testing of readers and reading speed, and thoroughly examined the various speed reading techniques and the actual improvement likely to be gained. One notable test he did pitted four groups of the fastest readers he could find against each other. The groups consisted of champion speed readers, fast college readers, successful professionals whose jobs required a lot of reading, and students who had scored highest on speed reading tests. Carver found that of his superstars, none could read faster than 600 words per minute with more than 75% retention of information.
"Keith Rayner is a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and has studied this for a long time too. In fact, one of his papers is titled 'Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research,' and he published that in 1993. Rayner has found that 95% of college level readers test between 200 and 400 words per minute, with the average right around 300. Very few people can read faster than 400 words per minute, and any gain would likely come with an unacceptable loss of comprehension."
I figure that my comfortable, steady reading speed in materials on a wide variety of subjects at an upper-division undergraduate to graduate school level is about 500 words per minute, with good comprehension. I plainly don't need "tl;dr" summaries of articles submitted to HN as often as many HN participants ask for those. (To be sure, many HN participants read English as a second language, and we should admire people who come here to participate in a second language, something very few Americans could do in a non-English-language online community.) I definitely read more slowly and with less comprehension on the first pass in Chinese or in German, my two strongest languages for second-language reading, but I have read whole books in both of those languages for fun or for research. I have diminishing ability to read other languages that are mentioned in my user profile here.
tl;dr: Don't worry about fancy eye movements too much, and don't worry about subvocalization too much. Just read steadily and think about what you are reading while you are reading it for best memory of what you read and best comprehension of what the author was trying to say. Building up your vocabulary--by more reading, of course--is the best way to build up your reading speed.
AFTER EDIT: The claim in another subthread here is specifically WRONG that Chinese constitutes any kind of proof about subvocalization. I'm not committing to a position on whether or not subvocalization, as defined by throat muscle movements, always occurs in reading, but I know from the books Visible Speech by John DeFrancis (a scholar of Chinese)
http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp...
and Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention by Stanislas Dehaene (a neuroscientist who does brain imaging studies)
http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-Invent...
and from my own study of four different Sinitic modern languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Hakka) that all writing systems, properly so called, are systems for writing out speech. Writing is based on speech everywhere in the world and the Chinese writing system is full of clues that most written characters are based on the SOUND of spoken morphemes.
How you might write the conversation
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script
is a writing system at all, rather than the kind of ornamentation from a pre-proto-writing stage known in several other sites of ancient civilizations. (As a reality check, we can remember that several regions of the world had elaborate empires and cities with extensive trade routes but without writing.)
Some of the controversy about this issue arises because of the extreme sensitivity of cultural heritage claims in south Asia in a region that spans a heavily militarized border. A good popular book about the nature and origin of writing systems in general, worldwide, is Visible Speech by John DeFrancis,
http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Diverse-Interactions-Co...
and the definitive compilation of international research on writing systems to the date of publication is The World's Writing Systems
http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-Daniels/d...
edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright and published in 1996. I haven't concluded absolutely that the Indus Valley Script could not be a writing system, but there is no sure evidence that it is, and the earliest attested writing system in a nearby region is the Brahmi script
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%C4%81hm%C4%AB_script
that is much more recent in time (a few centuries older than the common era, that is approximately 2,300 years old) and unquestionably based on the scripts of the ancient Near East.
http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/resources/global-etiquette/f...
Finnish, by far the majority language, has an alphabetic writing system that is recently reformed enough that it has very consistent sound-symbol correspondences.
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/finnish.htm
The late John DeFrancis
http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Diverse-Interactions-Co...
and current researcher and author Stanislas Dehaene
http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-New-Science-Read/dp/0143...
develop historical and international comparisons, backed up by brain imaging in Dehaene's book, to make the argument that initial reading instruction should at its best focus students' attention to sound-symbol correspondences in the written language taught in primary reading instruction.
But initial reading instruction in the United States specifically and in English-speaking countries in general is only half-heartedly done that way,
http://learninfreedom.org/readseri.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3024599/
and when school pupils in English-speaking countries struggle to learn to read independently, they are also likely to struggle to learn other subjects thoroughly.
The best current information I have suggests that initial reading instruction in Finland, whether in Finnish or in Swedish, is better done than much reading instruction in the English-speaking world, and that advantage may account for much of the national advantage Finland enjoys (and partially explain why immigrant families who use Finnish as a second language are the bottom group found in national-level sample testing of Finland for international surveys).
Thanks for using your very specific phrase in describing the research you recall. That helped me Google up a later study (I also had vague memories of the earlier study) that found that there is no particular difference in brain processing to the advantage of traditional Chinese script.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17885613
In the papers I have read on this issue, that seems to be the better replicated finding. As always, I recommend Peter Norvig's paper
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
as a checklist of what to look for in experimental research.
Because everyone who is neurologically normal and with good hearing can speak, and understand speech, we can be reasonably confident that there are powerful brain short-cuts for dealing with phonological processing. Cross-cultural comparisons do show a variety of societally relevant efficiencies from writing systems being more rather than less user-friendly in representing speech sounds. The long argument on this point is given by John DeFrancis's book Visible Speech.
http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Diverse-Interactions-Co...
A linguistic survey conducted by the P.R.C. regime discloses that barely more than half the population of China is conversant in the standard form of Mandarin.[1] Of course younger persons rather than older, and urban persons rather than rural, are more likely to be able to communicate with one another in standard Mandarin ("Putonghua"), but there are many people who have a need to communicate by speech who cannot. Contrary to much myth about the issue, I have NEVER seen two Chinese persons who cannot speak a mutually comprehensible language resort to writing out Chinese characters for one another in an attempt at conversation. To the contrary, I have seen many more examples of Chinese people (some from one place, some from another in China) speaking to one another in English as a useful interlanguage, although these days most people who can do that can also use Putonghua as an interlanguage.
Chinese characters still represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[2] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[3] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[4] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[5] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective.
I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts.
[1] http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp...
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie...
[5] http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm