I recently installed a speed reader on my tablet. Now I wonder how the minimal time needed to read an $N$-letter word grows.There was this previous question on the relationship between sentence length and reading time. However, I'm particularly interested in the relationship between word length and reading specific words.Does the time required to read an $N$-letter word grow linearly?
Does the time required to read a word grow linearly with the number of characters?
perception;performance;reading
The average response times for single words in a lexical decision task (depart real words from nonsense words) is plotted below. The curve follows a U-shape and span over several dozens of milliseconds.Figure 2. Average reaction time and 95% confidence interval for words with lengths from 3 to 13 letters if length was the only factor having an influence (all other factors have been partialled out).Ref: New et al., PBR (2006). Reexamining the word length effect in visual word recognition: New evidence from the English Lexicon Project