I've started reading books out loud in recent years. After a while I realized I could "read ahead", meaning my eyes didn't need to be on the word I was currently saying, but they could skip ahead several words, up to half a sentence.
It felt like the act of actually speaking had been relegated to a background task that was processing words from a queue, so my eyes and consciousness could operate further ahead in the text, while adding to that queue. It is actually really handy, to get a better flow and intonation, to have a bit of "lookahead" in the text.
I even realized I could start to think about the text I was reading, or even get distracted and think about other things (like I sometimes do if I'm reading silently) all the while continuing to read out loud. It's really interesting when you explicitly notice a task being moved from the conscious to unconscious part of your brain.
> even get distracted and think about other things (like I sometimes do if I'm reading silently) all the while continuing to read out loud
I used to read the Harry Potter series to my kids at night and definitely experienced this. The kids would ask a question and I'd realize that I needed to re-read the part I just read aloud because I was thinking about something else and couldn't remember what I had just read.
It felt like the act of actually speaking had been relegated to a background task that was processing words from a queue, so my eyes and consciousness could operate further ahead in the text, while adding to that queue. It is actually really handy, to get a better flow and intonation, to have a bit of "lookahead" in the text.
I even realized I could start to think about the text I was reading, or even get distracted and think about other things (like I sometimes do if I'm reading silently) all the while continuing to read out loud. It's really interesting when you explicitly notice a task being moved from the conscious to unconscious part of your brain.