When asked which ones they recognised, they were able to correctly identify 80% of the words they had read aloud, but only 60% of the silent ones. They were able to recall 27% of the words they had read aloud, but only 10% of those they’d read silently. In another study, adults aged 67 to 88 were given the same task – reading words either silently or aloud – before then writing down all those they could remember. Afterwards, they correctly recognised 87% of the words they’d read aloud, but only 70% of the silent ones. In one study in Australia, a group of seven-to-10-year-olds were presented with a list of words and asked to read some silently, and others aloud. The production effect has been replicated in numerous studies spanning more than a decade. It means that producing written words – that’s to say, reading them out loud – improves our memory of them. MacLeod has named this phenomenon the “production effect”. “It’s beneficial throughout the age range,” he says. This memory-boosting effect of reading aloud is particularly strong in children, but it works for older people, too. He and his collaborators have shown that people consistently remember words and texts better if they read them aloud than if they read them silently.

Many of us intuitively use it as a convenient tool for making sense of the written word, and are just not aware of it.Ĭolin MacLeod, a psychologist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, has extensively researched the impact of reading aloud on memory. And far from being a rare or bygone activity, it is still surprisingly common in modern life. The ancient art of reading aloud has a number of benefits for adults, from helping improve our memories and understand complex texts, to strengthening emotional bonds between people. Reading out loud is largely reserved for bedtime stories and performances.īut a growing body of research suggests that we may be missing out by reading only with the voices inside our minds. The majority of us bottle the words in our heads as if sitting in the hushed confines of a library.

Only occasionally, a different technique was mentioned: to “see” a tablet – to read it silently. If it is appropriate, have the king listen to it.” “I am sending a very urgent message,” says one letter from this period. On clay tablets written in ancient Iraq and Syria some 4,000 years ago, the commonly used words for “to read” literally meant “to cry out” or “to listen”. For much of history, reading was a fairly noisy activity.

Different words for read