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Our intuitive feeling of inner speech is not the only evidence pointing to a role of phonology in silent reading. Table 4.1 includes five other key findings.

Although there is good evidence that connections between orthography (the written code) and meaning are at the core of skilled word reading (see Grainger, Rastle, this volume), the findings in Table 4.1 make clear that phonology is involved too.

Phonology refers to the spoken forms of words. Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that distinguish between one word and another. The sounds /r/ and /l/ are different phonemes in English, because the spoken word /lap/ does not have the same meaning as /rap/. In alphabetic languages, phonemes are represented in written form by letters or combinations of letters, called graphemes. For instance, in English the grapheme ph refers to the phoneme /f/.

It is important to distinguish between phonology and articulation. Articulation refers to the muscle movements required for speech sounds to be made. It is possible to investigate the role of articulation in silent reading by asking people to read text while simultaneously repeating aloud “the the the.” This interferes with articulation, but does not interfere with silent reading (Besner, 1987). This finding tells us that the inner speech used in silent reading is not the same as the speech code for reading aloud. Hence the use of the term phonology refers to abstract sounds rather than articulation and the physical mechanism required to make speech sounds.

Table 4.1 Findings indicating that silent reading is affected by phonology

Finding	Example	Reference
People need more time to read silently sentences that are difficult to pronounce (tongue‐twister effect)	It takes longer to decide that “Twenty toys were in the trunk” is a meaningful sentence than “Several games were in the chest.”	McCutchen & Perfetti (1982)
Letter detection is easier in stressed syllables than in unstressed syllables	Readers are more likely to notice the letter e in introspect than in apartment	Drewnowski & Healy (1982)
Homophone errors in semantic decision	People more often misclassify the written word rows as a flower than robs	van Orden (1987)
Phonological errors in proofreading	Proofreaders more often miss the error in “they would meat for” than in “they would moat for”	Daneman & Stainton (1991)
Parafoveal homophone priming in reading	People read rains more quickly following parafoveal preview of reins than ruins	Pollatsek et al. (1992)

Reliance on phonology instead of articulation is further in line with the observation that silent reading is faster than reading aloud. It operates at 240–260 words per minute, depending on the length of the words (Brysbaert, 2019), whereas oral reading happens at the slower rate of 175–195 words per minute. At the same time, the speed of silent reading is not too fast for phonology to be involved, as listening comprehension remains good up to 270–290 words per minute (Carver, 1982; Kuperman et al., 2021).