Regarding speed auding, then, current research indicates that, although most information that is presented for auding does not demand processing rates in excess of 150-200 wpm (newscaster; professional readers for the blind typically read aloud at around 175 wpm:!: 25 wpm, Foulke and Sticht, 1969; Foulke, 1969), high school graduates and college students can aud at rates up to 250-300 wpm before their capacities for rapidly processing language information are overtaxed. If this represents some upper limit in rate of languaging, then the present model predicts that once reading skill is acquired, it will reflect this same limit in rate of languaging.

Data bearing on normative rates of silent reading are available from the recent (1972) National Assessment of Educational Progress (Report 02-R-09). This survey measured the rate at which respondents aged 9, 13, 17, and 26-35 (young adults) silently read materials with the knowledge that they would be tested for comprehension (memory for details) immediately afterward.

Data from the National Assessment report are summarized in Table 5. While a clear growth in reading rate is evident from 9-year-olds to 17-year-olds, there is no evidence for silent reading rates in excess of the 250-300 wpm reported previously for upper ranges of auding rates. For 17-year-olds and young adults, only some 10% of the samples read in excess of 300 wpm. Only 17 people out of the 7850 tested at all age levels read in excess of 750 wpm-and these readers could not consistently answer four out of five of the comprehension questions for two selections.

There is little evidence here, then, that people "typically" read at rates far in excess of rates they can contend with by auding. In fact, the median rates of silent reading for 17-year-olds and young adults are not too much higher than the 175 wpm average oral reading rates of professional newscasters and readers for the blind (cf., Foulke and Sticht,1969). It is also relevant to note that trained oral readers can produce speech rates as fast as 220-344 wpm when asked to produce maximal, yet intelligible rates of speech (Goldstein, 1940; Carroll, 1971; Miron and Brown, 1971). These rates of reading aloud are fast enough to encompass the range of the silent readers at the 75th percentile in Table 5. They are also within the range of silent reading rates for college students, which are typically found to be in the vicinity of 250-300 wpm (Gray, 1956; Taylor, 1964).