What is a normal reading speed for academic literature?

That’s pretty slow – by any standards. You might want to look into it.

That’s including occasional lunch- and stamina breaks and the like, but I think you’re on to something.

Twenty pages doesn’t sound like a lot (unless of course it’s a very complicated subject, different language with a lot of new words, very badly written, yada yada yada). Being a slow reader is not that bad if it means that you understand all of it, and never have to read it again. I sometimes find myself reading a passage five times, just because I keep forgetting what I was reading about (drifting off in my mind).

Complicated material, I’ll almost always have to reread pages spend time pondering on what each section talks about, research what they have said, etc. A good book will make complicated material easy to digest.

I couldn’t give a time frame it’s always different, just reading I can get through about 20 pages in 35 minutes, I regard myself as a slow reader.

European or African academic literature?

It’s in English, which I’m used to. The subject is somewhat complicated, by my standards. I need to figure out what everything means, but it’s not completely alien to me; I have the required background to be reading this.
As for the writing style, well, it’s a scientific report. It’s not a novel, and it’s not a phone book. It’s pragmatically conveying information, organised systematically to group related information together.

I do tend to be done after reading a text once, and don’t move on until I understand what a part says. Which is nice.

@kevbo
Is that a Monty Python reference?
I think the writer is American. It hardly matters. Science is a world-wide community.

First of all, I’m a fast reader to begin with. I read mainly academic work in biology, which is bound to be very different, and I tend to skim some parts and read others more carefully. For example, I’ll never read the methods unless I’m particularly interested in using a technique that they used. I always take extra time for the figures, however. I’d say that it takes me about an hour to read a six-page article, which would boil down to maybe three pages of really hard-core reading (including rereading bits I didn’t really get, etc), plus maybe six figures to interpret. I think that if I were to not skim any of it and make an attempt to understand the article in an extremely deep fashion, it would take me about twice as long. So six pages an hour if I’m going average pace, three pages an hour for extreme in-depth understanding. That actually doesn’t seem very different that what you’re reporting – and I think that it’s pretty typical from what I’ve heard from other biology grad and undergrad students I know. :)

@fireinthepriory
Hm. Yes.
Well, I’m afraid it’s like you said; our kinds of literature are very different.
I think the Humanities in general aren’t so much concerned with experiments, which means no figures and no article-specific methods. Linguistics in particular is only slowly coming to a level where looking for correlations in large bodies of data becomes feasible, and even then each data point will represent one language plus one construction, which means a lot of work. Furthermore the subject is so abstract that it’s easy to make the wrong generalisations based on too shallow investigation.
In a nutshell, the focus is on theory that’s backed up by pretty much individual facts.

Unless you’re talking about the neurological or the sociological sides of language, but I’m not.

@Fyrius Wow. From your explanation alone, I think that your slow reading speed is probably due to the complexity of your readings. (Each data point would be a language?? Holy mother. I don’t even know how to visualize that!) I wouldn’t worry too much about how long it takes you… I just prioritize so that if I don’t finish my reading, it’s the least important articles that get abandoned.

@fireinthepriory
Don’t visualise it. It means we don’t work much with statistics, and data points are individually treated with enough care to make it silly to think of them as data points.
At least that’s how it works in my sub-field.

What we’re doing is basically reverse-engineering the common base of a family of logical systems, and how these systems manifests themselves is our data. Articles often revolve around proposals of how a system works, illustrated by attested data that the system would produce if it worked like so and so.

I suppose it would make more sense to ask this question of my fellow students.

You say you’re a student, so maybe you should ask your fellow students? Sure it’s much more fun to ask on Fluther and wait for the monkey to show up, but you’re test is flawed in that there are too much variables your test group cannot access. The only way too exclude these variables is to put together a test group of your fellow students. Just keep in mind they will not always give you an honest answer.

Also I wouldn’t worry too much unless you are spending all your time reading, or until you start lagging behind on your homework and reading.

@markyy
Haha, great minds think alike.

@Fyrius My life was so much better pre-Fluther. I used to take that as a compliment, not so sure what to believe now :p I guess the ‘great minds’ are your fellow students, I just like to make everything about me ;)

Hahaha.
Phoenyx has a point. It misses mine, though.
Even if there are some pretty great minds among my class mates.

I think your reading speed sounds just about normal, actually. Like @fireinthepriory, I tend to read articles about experiments, but these take me a really, really long time.

As a point of reference, I tend to read fiction books at the rate of 1–2 pages/minute. I can knock out a 300 page book in a couple hours, no problem. But I have come across plenty of journal articles—even in my specific field—that could easily take 5 hours to cover 20 pages. When the material is that complex it is exhausting to wade through. I had a couple 25ish page papers earlier this quarter that took on the order of 8 hours to really get through.

That said, I have gotten a lot faster since the beginning of grad school. So there’s hope you’ll get faster, too. I think.

When I hit my stride, I can read over 700 words a minute, but that’ usually light-reading: blogs, novels, etc. Once you hit non-fiction, especially highly technical stuff, it slows you down. If it’s a textbook, reading speed goes down even more. It’s really hard to say, but I don’t think I’ve ever had to read anything so difficult that I couldn’t hit a speed of at least 5–10 pages an hour.

Depends.

In graduate school it took me 3 weeks (10 hours a day) to read 20 pages related to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_sketch_for_Goedel's_first_incompleteness_theorem

Linguistics was my minor. It took me 10 hours to read a 400-pages book on

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonology

Many other subjects were in between.

@mattbrowne
“It took me 10 hours to read a 400-pages book on [phonology]”
O_O

…seriously?
Was is an overview sort of book? Did you manage to wrap your head around SPE and autosegmentalism and Optimality Theory and all that jazz, in ten hours?

Phonology courses I’ve followed would spread that sort of content over two months and a half.

Yes, overview. Lots of graphs and diagrams. Plus I bought the book after the lecture about phonemes and allophones and so forth. The class was a mixture of humanities students, some computer scientists and a few others. Linguistics is very formal and people studying literature for example really struggled at first. I had to deal with Turing machines and semigroups, so I was used to this kind of approach. If I remember correctly autosegmental phonology came a few semester later, but my focus really was syntax. Unification-based approaches were quite popular in the mid 80ies. Later I got involved in machine translation.

Well, I’m impressed.

Graphs and diagrams, you say? In phonology? Hm.
I’m trying to picture what you’re talking about. Optimality Theory has a lot of tables, and SPE has the phoneme feature tables, but otherwise I wonder what you mean… I mainly recall little syllable tree structures and rule notation.

By the way, if I would want to make you feel old, I would now point out that I only started existing in the late eighties. :P

Come on, it was a rough estimate to point out that the nature of the academic literature influences the reading speed. Isn’t this what your question is about? One thing I remember about the phonology book, it was really going through dozens of languages and the complete international phonetic alphabet. There are for example too allophones for the ch sound in German. I think it’s the same in Dutch, although in German the ch is never at the beginning of a word. So ich and ach in German sound differently, but it’s still only one phoneme. Not so in Arabic. There were some funny examples changing the meanings of words. I also remember drawings of mouths and tongues and which muscles have to be used to produce sounds. And a section with statistics like which sounds are universal or at least very common versus very seldom. All babies in the world seem to learn sounds in the order of commonness. Saying mama requires almost no muscles expect for opening and shutting the mouth. It was really a lot of fun to read. Maybe it was 300 pages, if you find my estimate too dubious. Maybe it was 12 hours. So what. What came later required far more reading time, for example when trying to understand Chomsky’s

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_and_binding_theory

I was born in 1962.

So what’s your special interest in linguistics?

Haha, okay. I’m going too deeply into this.
Just curious, really. :) I’m not calling you a liar.

Arabic phonology is fascinating, by the way. :D I still think what they do with vowels there is exotically beautiful and freaking weird at the same time. I remember how amazed I was when I read about Egyptian Arabic having verbs that conjugate just by changing the vowels, like katab meaning “to write” and aktib meaning “I write”, stuff like that.

I’m particularly interested in syntax and general linguistics theory. The latter because that’s where the actual mystery lies, and the former because there’s a nerdy kind of charm about reverse-engineering a purely abstract system of structures and rules.
I’m thinking of getting into language typology, too. It’s important work, it’s not as fickle as the purely theoretical business (it’s actual empirical data gathering), and they can use people with a thorough background in syntactic theory there.
It’s the subject of my internship. Maybe I’ll look for a job in that direction.

Good luck with your studies and future research! Maybe you’re the first person on our planet to write a program capable of passing the Turing test. I think general linguistics theory will be very important for this achievement.

Hahaha, don’t bet on it. But maybe if I’m lucky I’ll get to help the guys who do. :P
I do concur linguistics would be important to the creation of a veritable AI, but there’s a buttload of other things that still need to be achieved as well.