Left out on purpose
Gulp trains what the evidence supports, so some popular techniques are missing.
- Eliminating subvocalization. The inner voice supports understanding, and it comes back when the text gets harder (Hardyck & Petrinovich, 1970).
- 1,000 words a minute and more. Such claims don’t survive questions afterwards (Rayner et al., 2016). Results over 1,200 words a minute are labelled as skimming.
- Peripheral-vision and eye exercises. The eyes aren’t the bottleneck (McConkie & Rayner, 1975; Rayner, 1998).
- Bionic Reading. An online test by Readwise with more than 2,000 readers found no speed benefit (2022, not peer reviewed).
- Dyslexia fonts. No improvement in reading rate or accuracy in controlled tests (Wery & Diliberto, 2017). Extra letter spacing, which has evidence, is offered instead (Zorzi et al., 2012).
Sources
- Hardyck, C. D., & Petrinovich, L. F. (1970). Subvocal speech and comprehension level as a function of the difficulty level of reading material. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 9, 647-652.
- McConkie, G. W., & Rayner, K. (1975). The span of the effective stimulus during a fixation in reading. Perception & Psychophysics, 17(6), 578-586.
- Rayner, K. (1998). Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. Psychological Bulletin, 124(3), 372-422.
- Rayner, K., Schotter, E. R., Masson, M. E. J., Potter, M. C., & Treiman, R. (2016). So much to read, so little time: How do we read, and can speed reading help? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(1), 4-34.
- Wery, J. J., & Diliberto, J. A. (2017). The effect of a specialized dyslexia font, OpenDyslexic, on reading rate and accuracy. Annals of Dyslexia, 67(2), 114-127.
- Zorzi, M., Barbiero, C., Facoetti, A., Lonciari, I., Carrozzi, M., Montico, M., Bravar, L., George, F., Pech-Georgel, C., & Ziegler, J. C. (2012). Extra-large letter spacing improves reading in dyslexia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(28), 11455-11459.