NO KIDDING? Speed reading apps may kill comprehension.

“Removing eye movements from the reading process is precisely the fatal flaw in such speed-reading apps and the reason why they will not be useful for reading any text that is not extremely easy or short,” the authors conclude.

That may be overselling the results a bit. Although the large number of trials ensured that all the results were statistically significant, they still relied on only 40 college students. In theory, at least, college students spend a lot of their time trying to extract meaning from textbook sentences, and so they might not reflect the general population that well. It’s probably worth extending the analysis to a more diverse population, as well as a group that had experience using something like Spritz for their reading.