I did see a study somewhere that said part of the reason some people read faster than others is that they have trained their eyes--unconsciously in a lot of cases--to only read the tops of the words, thus cutting their assimilation time and increasing the speed at which the eyes can scan a page. I have no idea if this is a valid study or not, though.
This makes sense to me--I'm also a fast reader (I finished Gone With the Wind in two days when I was eleven and I probably could have finished it in one if it weren't because I acted up and my parents held it hostage from me for a while
). In English and my native tongue I rarely "read" per se, the process is more like looking at the words. I've seen them so much that my brain makes associations readily. It sounds weird to actually write that out, but that's what it feels like.
This is refering to fiction though, I have to force myself to slow down when I deal with other types of writing (*cough* and not reading for enjoyment) because the associations may vary (for instance if I plowed through an academic text, it'd be as if I never read it at all, there's more than words/meanings-associations on a page there). Also I struggle with another language for a living and find it impossible to do this "looking" process at all. Because of that I'm a ridiculously slow reader in it. it frustrates the crap out of me.
