Inner Speech during Silent Reading Reflects the Reader's Regional Accent

Ruth Filik,Emma Barber,André Aleman

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0025782

Abstract

While reading silently, we often have the subjective experience of inner speech. However, there is currently little evidence regarding whether this inner voice resembles our own voice while we are speaking out loud. To investigate this issue, we compared reading behaviour of Northern and Southern English participants who have differing pronunciations for words like ‘glass’, in which the vowel duration is short in a Northern accent and long in a Southern accent. Participants' eye movements were monitored while they silently read limericks in which the end words of the first two lines (e.g., glass/class) would be pronounced differently by Northern and Southern participants. The final word of the limerick (e.g., mass/sparse) then either did or did not rhyme, depending on the reader's accent. Results showed disruption to eye movement behaviour when the final word did not rhyme, determined by the reader's accent, suggesting that inner speech resembles our own voice.

Highlights

IntroductionWe often have the subjective experience of inner speech, or a ‘‘voice inside our heads’’
While reading silently, we often have the subjective experience of inner speech, or a ‘‘voice inside our heads’’
Measures of eye movement behavior are reported for the critical region, which comprised the final word of the limerick (e.g., Kath, Garth)

Summary

Introduction

We often have the subjective experience of inner speech, or a ‘‘voice inside our heads’’. There is currently little empirical evidence for this phenomenon, in particular, concerning the question of whether the voice in our heads that we experience during silent reading resembles our own voice while we are speaking out loud. Previous research investigating the recognition of words in isolation suggests that phonological information is activated when participants are reading silently [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. A number of eye movement studies have examined the activation of phonological information during sentence reading [9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]. Results from some studies [18,19] suggest that the phonological representations activated during reading may instead resemble external speech. A number of studies have demonstrated that various prosodic factors, such as metrical structure and prosodic phrasing, can influence word-level processing, parsing, and interpretive processes during silent reading [20,21,22,23,24,25,26]

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Conclusion