Читать книгу The Science of Reading - Группа авторов - Страница 70

Marc Brysbaert

In his classic book on the psychology of reading, Huey (1908) was motivated by the question of whether silent reading was possible without inner pronunciation. This was a natural question for him to ask, given that historical accounts tell us that silent reading was rare before the late nineteenth century and, instead, people tended to read aloud, or mumble when they wanted to spare their neighbors (Manguel, 1996; Pearson & Goodin, 2010). Even nowadays, young children require months of practice before they can read silently (Wright et al., 2004) and most people report experiencing some kind of inner speech as they read (Alderson‐Day, & Fernyhough, 2015; Vilhauer, 2016).

Bakhtin (1981) argued that the inner voice need not be our own voice. When we know the writer well, we sometimes hear their voice as we read silently. Zhou and Christianson (2016) reported that text comprehension may even improve if we imagine someone else reading the text aloud. There is evidence for stable individual differences in the degree to which people experience inner speech (Roebuck & Lupyan, 2020; Vilhauer, 2017). For some individuals, it feels a powerful phenomenon, whereas others are surprised when told that some experience an inner voice in silent reading.

This chapter considers key questions and issues concerning the role of phonology in silent reading. I first review classic findings that point to phonological effects in reading. The nature of these phonological effects are discussed, and their implications for computational and neural models of word reading are considered. It will become clear that visual language processing cannot be understood properly without taking word phonology into account.