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A new speed-reading app, Spritz, premiered in March 2014. Its makers claim that Spritz allows users to read at staggeringly high rates of speed: 600 or even 1,000 words per minute. (The average college graduate reads at a rate of about 300 words per minute.) Spritz can do this, they say, by circumventing the limitations imposed by our visual system. The author of this article argues that your brain has an even more superior "app": expertise, which creates a happy balance between speed and comprehension. In their forthcoming book, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, researchers Henry Roediger III and Mark McDaniel (along with writer Peter Brown) liken expertise to a "brain app" that makes reading and other kinds of intellectual activity proceed more efficiently and effectively. In the minds of experts, the authors explain, "a complex set of interrelated ideas" has "fused into a meaningful whole." The mental "chunking" that an expert - someone deeply familiar with the subject she's reading about - can do gives her a decided speed and comprehension advantage over someone who is new to the material, for whom every fact and idea encountered in the text is a separate piece of information yet to be absorbed and connected. People reading within their domain of expertise have lots of related vocabulary and background knowledge, both of which allow them to steam along at full speed while novices stop, start, and re-read, struggling with unfamiliar words and concepts. Deep knowledge of what we're reading about propels the reading process in other ways as well. As we read, we're constantly building and updating a mental model of what's going on in the text, elaborating what we've read already and anticipating what will come next. A reader who is an expert in the subject he's reading about will make more detailed and accurate predictions of what upcoming sentences and paragraphs will contain, allowing him to read quickly while filling in his alrea

Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, notes that while Google is good at finding information, the brain beats it in two essential ways. 1. Context: Champions of Google underestimate how much the meaning of words and sentences changes with context. With the right knowledge in memory, your brain deftly puts words in context. 2. Speed Quick access is supposed to be a great advantage of using the internet. Students have always been able to look up the quadratic equation rather than memorize it, but opening a new browser tab takes moments, not the minutes required to locate the right page in the right book. Yet "moments" is still much slower than the brain operates. That's why the National Mathematics Advisory Panel listed "quick and effortless recall of facts" as one essential of math education. Speed matters for reading, too. Researchers report that readers need to know at least 95 percent of the words in a text for comfortable absorption. Pausing to find a word definition is disruptive. Good readers have reliable, speedy connections among the brain representations of spelling, sound and meaning. Speed matters because it allows other important work - for example, puzzling out the meaning of phrases - to proceed. Using knowledge in the head is also self-sustaining, whereas using knowledge from the internet is not. Every time you retrieve information from memory, it becomes a bit easier to find it the next time.

A recent study of the speech information rate of seven languages concludes that there is considerable variation in the speed at which languages are spoken, but much less variation in how efficiently languages communicate the same information.

Being able to speed read and still comprehend what you just read is a worthwhile skill to develop before going to college. This article provides you with 10 ways that you can improve speed reading comprehension. One surprising tip was to not highlight the text as the main goal is to be able to read fluidly and efficiently.

This article discusses a study that explored the average rate that people read in their native languages. Through this study, it is evident that the various aspects that make up a language play a large role when it comes to the speed that a person reads at. Spanish speakers read the fastest syllables at 526 syllables per minute.

John Pennebacker, a University of Texas-Austin psychologist, found that language could successfully predict speed dating successes, as well as the relative longevity of such matches.. When the language style of two people matched, when they used pronouns, prepositions, articles and so forth in similar ways at similar rates, they were much more likely to end up on a date. "The more similar [they were] across all of these function words, the higher the probability that [they] would go on a date in a speed dating context," Pennebaker says. "And this is even cooler: We can even look at ... a young dating couple... [and] the more similar [they] are ... using this language style matching metric, the more likely [they] will still be dating three months from now." This is not because similar people are attracted to each other, Pennebaker says; people can be very different. It's that when we are around people that we have a genuine interest in, our language subtly shifts. "When two people are paying close attention, they use language in the same way," he says. "And it's one of these things that humans do automatically." Pennebacker also says that by analyzing language, you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status. "It's amazingly simple," Pennebaker says, "Listen to the relative use of the word "I." What you find is completely different from what most people would think. The person with the higher status uses the word "I" less.

"But the speed of the typists' keystrokes revealed something else. After hitting the wrong key, a typist's fingers slowed down for the next keystroke, even if the researchers sneakily fixed the error so that the typist didn't notice it. In these cases, a typist wasn't explicitly aware of the mistake, but the brain's motor signal changed nevertheless."

A longitudinal study conducted by USC suggests that music training during childhood, even for a period as brief as two years, can accelerate brain development and sound processing. We believe that this may benefit language acquisition in children given that developing language and reading skills engage similar brain areas.

A study in 1994 tested 50 surgeons' ability to perform their daily operation room tasks while listening to music. The surgeons were split into three groups. The first group was allowed to choose what music they were going to listen to, while the second group had the music chosen by the experimenters. The third group did not listen to any music. The results showed that the first group had the highest task speed and accuracy, while the third group had the lowest task speed and accuracy.

This article talks about how some languages are more efficient than others, meaning that some languages pack in more information per syllable than others. This affects the speed of a language because the greater the density of information, the longer it takes one's brain to process and verbalize a thought. Therefor, languages with low efficiency (and low density of information) are spoken faster than languages with high efficiency (and high density of information).

Prairie dogs have different alarm calls for different predators and can also indicate the size, color, speed, etc of the predator. In fact, it was found that the animals could combine and restructure their calls to describe things they hadn't seen before. This was found by having different breeds of dog (a golden retriever, a husky, a Dalmatian, a cocker spaniel) wander through the prairie dog territory one at a time and recording the resulting alarm calls; the calls highly varied even though the 'predator' was of the same predator class. They also showed different calls when researchers wearing different colored shirts walked through the territory (the same for different heights and walking speeds).

This is an article about the experiences, inner thoughts, and struggles of a girl who is deaf. From this article, I learned and realized many things such as how difficult lipreading can be. Originally, I was amazed at how deaf people could read lips and thought they could understand every word someone said. However, I learned from this article that that is NOT true and things such as accents and a lack of expression can make it difficult for one to decipher what is being said.

This is a joint study done by professors at the University of Maryland and University of Washington on students between 4th and 9th grade and the common patterns and relationships found in their writing samples based on style, speed, and legibility.

'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and many countries are developing their own internet slang. But is the web changing language and is everyone up to speed? In April 2010 the informal online banter of the internet-savvy collided with the traditional and austere language of the court room.

Researchers from Univ. of Washington did an experiment and found certain brain wave patterns can influence and make learning a second language easier/quicker.

Long-term language change is inevitable. People need to convey a wide range of emotions or objects, and they will always need to find the words to do so. Technology may help to speed up this process, and it also allows people of all ages to be inventive and experimental, perhaps more than ever before. Only dead languages never change.

Playing a series of sounds to infants can speed up the way they process language and can also predict which infants will have trouble with language as they develop. Researchers concluded that processing language sounds sets up the neural foundation in babies.

The way that babies react to certain sounds can indicate their learning patterns and language capabilities later in life.

The shift from print to digital reading may lead to more than changes in speed and physical processing. It may come at a cost to understanding, analyzing, and evaluating a text. However, research suggests that people can deeply read using digital media: what's needed is self-monitoring, focus, and use of strategies such as annotation, either the old-fashioned way, or digitally. Digital devices in and of themselves may not disrupt the fuller synthesis of deep reading. What does: multitasking on the Internet and distractions caused by hyperlinks. Indeed, some data suggest that, in certain environments and on certain types of tasks, we can read equally well in any format.

This article discusses how being able to speak multiple languages can slow down the speed at which your brain ages.