Speed-reading advocates, who falsely promise faster reading speeds, teach you how to skim a text. Comprehension declines at a rate inversely proportional to the gain in speed.
Importantly, the upper limit for reading speed requires years of practice to attain, because it requires the brain systems that support vision, attention, word identification, language processing and eye movements to operate in a highly coordinated manner. Anything that prevents this coordination will therefore reduce comprehension.
So what are the likely consequences of digital reading?
With some devices, such as e-readers, there is little reason to suspect digital reading differs from the reading of books, because both formats support the mental processes required for skilled reading.
The more questionable devices are those introducing distractions (such as news websites interspersed with ads) or which have suboptimal formatting, such as centre-justified text with large or unequal-sized gaps between words. The latter is rarely a feature of paper-based texts.
Although the consequences of these two factors are under-researched, enough has been learned about human cognition to make informed predictions.
For example, images and audio unrelated to a text such as pop-up ads can capture attention. Although most adults have developed a level of executive control sufficient to ignore such distractions, young children have not.
The implications for a child who is struggling to understand the meaning of a text are obvious. Their comprehension will suffer to the extent that additional effort is required to ignore distractions, or if they do not yet have the mental coordination to understand the text has been disrupted.
There is also evidence from eye-tracking experiments that many digital environments, such as webpages, can induce specific reading strategies, such as skimming for gist or searching for information.
Although such strategies might be adaptive in some contexts, they reduce overall comprehension. This possibility should be especially concerning for children, because years of practice are needed to coordinate the mental systems that support adult levels of reading skill.
Such concerns have recently drawn more attention, because the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic caused a shift to online education and a marked increase in digital reading. Although these changes were motivated by practical necessity, their long-term consequences remain unclear.
So far, eye-tracking research has been carried out on computer screens. New technology is becoming available which will allow us to directly compare eye movements and comprehension between digital devices and paper. This should give us more clarity about the benefits versus costs of digital devices.
Given reading ability is predictive of one’s education, socioeconomic status and wellbeing, the importance of assessing the long-term consequences of digital reading cannot be overstated.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
(The Conversation/HG)
