Reading Aloud for Adults: How to Do It as Brain Training

In 2008 a research group including Ryuta Kawashima of Tohoku University in Japan published the results of a randomised controlled trial with 124 people aged 70 to 86. One group did reading and simple arithmetic tasks, including reading passages aloud, for about 15 minutes a day for six months. That group improved on a test of frontal lobe function and on a test of processing speed. The group that did nothing did not.

In Japan, reading aloud has long been talked about as a classic form of brain training. Autumn is also a good season to pick up a book, and some people may want to try reading one out loud. In this post I go through what research says about reading aloud and where its limits are, and then how an adult can make a habit of it.

What research shows

Studies of reading aloud and arithmetic

The study above looked at the effect of tasks that combined reading aloud and arithmetic. The results are interesting, but there are several things to keep in mind.

First, the comparison group did nothing at all. The training group worked on tasks every day and was also in contact with the researchers. With this design you cannot separate how much of the difference came from the reading and arithmetic themselves, and how much came from doing something every day or from contact with other people. Second, reading aloud was done together with arithmetic, so the effect of reading aloud alone cannot be pulled out. On another test often used in dementia screening (the MMSE), there was no clear difference between the groups.

In 2005 Kawashima and colleagues also published a study of 32 people with Alzheimer’s-type dementia living in a care home, who did similar reading and arithmetic tasks for six months. Again there was a difference on the frontal function test, but it was a small study with 16 people in each group.

For brain training in general, practised tasks get better, but there is no clear evidence that the gains spread to daily life. I summarised this in Does Brain Training Work? Reading aloud can be seen the same way.

Saying words aloud makes them easier to remember

Where something firmer can be said about reading aloud is its link with memory. In a 2010 paper, Colin MacLeod and his colleagues in Canada showed across eight experiments that when people read some words in a list aloud and the rest silently, they remembered the words they had said aloud better. This is called the production effect.

There is a condition, though. The effect showed up clearly when aloud and silent words were mixed in the same list. MacLeod and his colleagues explain that the words said aloud stand out because they carry the extra cue of having been spoken. It does not seem that reading everything aloud makes everything easier to remember.

Read aloud only the parts you want to remember. For everyday use, that form makes sense.

Reading aloud is slower than reading silently

In 2019 Marc Brysbaert published a meta-analysis of studies on reading speed in English. Adults read non-fiction silently at about 238 words a minute, and aloud at about 183. Reading aloud is slower because every word has to be fully spoken.

So reading aloud is not practice for reading fast. If anything, it is practice in reading slowly without skipping a word.

What to read

Short pieces that feel good to say. Poems, short essays and folk tales have a rhythm that suits reading aloud. Project Gutenberg offers a large number of books that are out of copyright. I explained how to use it in What Is Project Gutenberg?

A newspaper column. It takes a few minutes to read one, and there is a new one every day. You also get used to the words of current affairs.

A scene from a favourite novel. Scenes with a lot of dialogue are fun to read while changing your voice for each character.

At first, choose writing with no words you are unsure how to pronounce. If you keep stopping at words you cannot read, it is hard to keep going.

How to do it

What follows are some ideas. They are not methods that have been tested in studies.

Three to five minutes at a time. Short daily reading is easier to keep up than long sessions. Set a timer, and when it goes off, stop at a natural break.

Accuracy and clarity first. Speed comes naturally once you can read accurately. If you aim for speed from the start, it is easy to swallow word endings or skip lines.

Read the same passage for a few days. A passage you stumbled through the first time will feel easy by the third. Noticing yourself getting used to it makes it easier to want to continue. Recording how long it takes to read is another good idea.

Say only what you want to remember. With work documents or study books, you do not need to read everything aloud. Going by the production effect above, saying only the important parts out loud seems better for remembering them.

When it is hard to read out loud

Family members are asleep, sound carries in your flat, or it is simply not possible at work. Many people who would like to read aloud have nowhere to do it.

• Read in a quiet voice. It does not need to be loud
• Read when you can be alone: early in the morning, in the car, on a walk
• Read with your family. Reading a story to a child is reading aloud too
• On days when you really cannot use your voice, read while moving your lips slightly

Rather than looking for the perfect place, you can simply fix a short time for reading somewhere in your day. I also wrote about keeping a habit going in Can’t Stay Focused? A 10-Minute Daily Practice for Adults.

About BrainDojo

BrainDojo is an iPhone and iPad app for keeping up daily brain training with short mini-games.

Reading aloud is done in the Speed Read games. In Speed Read English, after a countdown, a passage appears one sentence at a time. Each time, it is picked at random from excerpts of classic English novels that are out of copyright. You read each sentence aloud and tap the button to go on to the next. At the end you see how many words a minute you read, next to your previous result. An Animal Score, from a tortoise up to a dragon depending on your speed, also appears (it can be turned off in the settings).

The game does not listen to your voice or check how you read. It only measures the time until you finish. So, as I wrote above, use it while checking for yourself that you read each sentence accurately and without stumbling. You will sometimes get the same passage again, and comparing with your previous result shows you getting used to it.

There is also Speed Read Japanese, with excerpts from Japanese writers such as Miyazawa Kenji and Natsume Soseki, and haiku. It appears in the training list when the app is set to Japanese, where the font size, furigana, romaji furigana and vertical or horizontal text can be changed in the Game Settings.

Every training except the newest ones is free to play, and so are Today’s Training, the Brain Dojo Check once a day, and a calendar where you stamp the days you trained. The free version shows ads. BrainDojo Plus removes them and opens the new trainings anytime. When a new training appears in Today’s Training, you can play it free that day.

Getting Started with BrainDojo walks through the first session, and BrainDojo Free vs Plus compares the two plans.