Abstract
Readers often describe vivid experiences of voices and characters in a manner that has been likened to hallucination. Little is known, however, of how common such experiences are, nor the individual differences they may reflect. Here we present the results of a 2014 survey conducted in collaboration with a national UK newspaper and an international book festival. Participants (n=1566) completed measures of reading imagery, inner speech, and hallucination-proneness, including 413 participants who provided detailed free-text descriptions of their reading experiences. Hierarchical regression analysis indicated that reading imagery was related to phenomenological characteristics of inner speech and proneness to hallucination-like experiences. However, qualitative analysis of reader's accounts suggested that vivid reading experiences were marked not just by auditory phenomenology, but also their tendency to cross over into non-reading contexts. This supports social-cognitive accounts of reading while highlighting a role for involuntary and uncontrolled personality models in the experience of fictional characters.
Highlights
Vivid or immersive experiences are often described in relation to reading fictional narratives (Caracciolo & Hurlburt, 2016; Green, 2004; Ryan, 1999, 2015)
It is intuitive to understand why a text – even if not read out loud – would need to be voiced in some way to be read. This is sometimes conceptualized either as inner speech – namely, the various ways in which people talk to themselves (Alderson-Day & Fernyhough, 2015) – or more broadly in terms of auditory imagery, i.e. purposefully imagining the qualities of characters’ or narrators’ voices (Hubbard, 2010; Kuzmicová, 2013)
Less than 1% of responses were left blank in Section 1
Summary
Vivid or immersive experiences are often described in relation to reading fictional narratives (Caracciolo & Hurlburt, 2016; Green, 2004; Ryan, 1999, 2015) It seems common for readers (and writers) to report ‘‘hearing” the voices of fictional characters, in a way that suggests they have a life of their own (Vilhauer, 2016; Waugh, 2015). It is intuitive to understand why a text – even if not read out loud – would need to be voiced in some way to be read This is sometimes conceptualized either as inner speech – namely, the various ways in which people talk to themselves (Alderson-Day & Fernyhough, 2015) – or more broadly in terms of auditory imagery, i.e. purposefully imagining the qualities of characters’ or narrators’ voices (Hubbard, 2010; Kuzmicová, 2013). Evidence of inner speech involvement comes from psycholinguistic studies on reading: when we read, phonologically longer stimuli take longer to read than
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