An advanced expert of the Park-Sasaki method (FT; female, 59 years old) participated. Prior to participation FT had participated in the training course for 7.4 years and attained the high stage of expertise. According to the specific program of the method, she was reportedly capable of reading more than 120,000 characters per minute using the familiar sentences in the training textbook of the method. FT reported that her daily reading speed in private when reading Japanese books for pleasure was between 5,000 and 8,000 characters per minute. That is, she reported that the reading speed which she can practically show for unfamiliar text was much lower than when reading familiar text during training. The other 14 Japanese university undergraduate students having no experience with speed-reading training (10 females and 4 males; age, 18-19 years; mean age, 18.9 years, SD = 0.3) participated as the untrained control group. For the no-reading control and gist/detail control conditions, data from the same participants as in Study 1 were used, except that data for one additional story used in Study 2 were included. In addition, the other four participants (3 females and one male; 19-39 years; mean age, 24.0 years, SD = 8.7) had another control condition referred to as FT's-speed control. All participants had normal or corrected-to-normal vision.
The same setup as in Study 1 was used for Study 2. The materials were the same as in Study 1 except that one additional story from the same series of novels was used for the test, which now involved five sessions in total. This new story, Issho-no-onegai (I'll never ask for anything again), was 9,046 characters (5,654 Japanese words) long and corresponded to 23 pages on the display. All participants declared that they had not previously read any of the stories used for the test. The procedure was the same as in Study 1 except that five test sessions were implemented and that the instructions were modified. That is, participants were told to read the sentences while comprehending the content, so that they would be able to answer content-related questions presented following reading. While maintaining that level of understanding, they were instructed to read not slowly nor lazily but as rapidly as possible. FT's-speed control participants were non-speed-readers and participated in all the five test sessions following FT's participation. These participants answered the questions after having each page display switched automatically after the same presentation time as FT had. They were instructed that the pages would be switched automatically at speed and that they should do their best to comprehend the stories without pressing response buttons by themselves.
Eye movement measures by the eye-tracker were analyzed and examined generally in the same manner as in Study 1. Examination of correlations between eye-movement measures, reading speed and comprehension scores, already reported in Study 1, were not duplicated in this study. In order to identify the parts of the sentence display where the participants' gaze was frequently fixated, the sentence area of 20x14 cm was divided into subareas of every 2 cm for both the vertical and horizontal axes. These subareas are referred to as X1 to X10 (from left to right) for the horizontal axis and as Y1 to Y7 (from top to bottom) for the vertical axis. Durations of fixations at each of these subareas were examined. All fixations, including those during first-pass reading, re-reading, and return sweeps, were included in this analysis.