How do you experience reading silently to yourself?

[cmarshall]

By chance I discovered something interesting in conversation with a friend the other day.  In discussing silent reading she mentioned that she always "hears" the text as a voice in her mind.  I was shocked and replied that I never heard the text as a voice, but only as experienced the concepts.  She had a hard time grasping that at first.  I asked another person who reports that she not only "hears" the text when reading silently, but sometimes shifts that mental voice to suit the content, for instance, she hears David Attenborough when she reads The Guardian.

 

In the ancient world reading meant reading aloud.  So, when St. Augustine (about 300 AD) went to visit St. Jerome he could hear Jerome reading to himself out loud before he got to his house.  If I remember correctly silent reading came in with the Renaissance.

 

It makes one wonder how varied are the experiences of silent reading.

Edited December 25, 2019 by cmarshall

[pgrahmm]

No visualization? I'm not sure this fits under the text concept, however, with descriptive wording I quite often "picture" the scene in play.....This changes, of course with subject matter and reason I'm involved....

[wgdanson]

What about when you are thinking? Do you think in your native language?

And what have you been smoking?

[cmarshall]

3 minutes ago, wgdanson said:

What about when you are thinking? Do you think in your native language?

And what have you been smoking?

Those who don't enjoy thinking are always welcome to resume their survey of current television programming.

[GalaxyMan]

22 minutes ago, pgrahmm said:

No visualization? I'm not sure this fits under the text concept, however, with descriptive wording I quite often "picture" the scene in play.....This changes, of course with subject matter and reason I'm involved....

Agreed. That's how I interpreted it, too, text concept is visualization.

[4MyEgo]

I hear voices all time, but not when reading, usually when walking down the street, they are pretty similar, "hello hanhom man, where you go", I know they are just voices, because I never see anyone when I look up ????

 

[wgdanson]

17 minutes ago, cmarshall said:

Those who don't enjoy thinking are always welcome to resume their survey of current television programming.

Are you meaning that I do not have to think when watching Attenborough, political programmes or The Muppets?

[cmarshall]

2 minutes ago, GalaxyMan said:

Agreed. That's how I interpreted it, too, text concept is visualization.

Not at all.  Visualization is the mental construction of an image, a visual thing.  So, I can visualize the Parthenon in my mind's eye.  Understanding that the text is referring to the one and only Parthenon in Athens built by Pericles, does not necessarily involve any such visualization.  And then there are all the concepts that are not inherently visual at all such as consensus, GDP, anomie, etc. at infinitum.  When I understand what the text has to say about such concepts there is no mental image.  

[Stocky]

I hear the narrative, the voice changes per character as does the accent where appropriate, and I have a visualisation of the character, that builds as the story adds more details. One of the reasons screen adaptations can be so irritating, because the person on screen doesn't resemble the person in my imagination. Similarly I build a mental image of places and things in the story which accompany the narrative voice in my head.

 

 

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Edited December 25, 2019 by Stocky

[cmarshall]

2 minutes ago, Stocky said:

I hear the narrative, the voice changes per character as does the accent where appropriate, and I have a visualisation of the character, that builds as the story adds more details. One of the reasons screen adaptations can be so irritating, because the person on screen doesn't resemble the person in my imagination.

Do you read anything other than fiction?  News articles, history, politics, etc.?

[Stocky]

6 minutes ago, cmarshall said:

Do you read anything other than fiction?  News articles, history, politics, etc.?

Yes. Similarly I will have a mental picture of the person or places.

 

Curiously, when reading non-fiction I often find the voice is someone like David Attenborough!

Edited December 25, 2019 by Stocky

[OneMoreFarang]

I knew I hear the text but then I thought let's test the details so I read a couple of emails which I received recently from people I know. And somehow I "heard" the emails in the voice of the sender.

 

I remember a seminar with Paul Watzlawick a long time ago. He asked the audience a couple of easy multiplications and everybody should think about how they "get" the result. I.e. what is 3x4? Or 5x6? How do you get the result? Do you hear the result in your head? There are lots of different variations how this works. If you like think about it and I will tell the details in a later comment.

 

OP, I don't want to take over your thread but I think this is similar and interesting.

[cmarshall]

3 minutes ago, Stocky said:

Yes. Similarly I will have a mental picture of the person or places.

What about when you read about Thai immigration policy?  Or GDP?  Or other subject matter that lacks a visual dimension?

[mauGR1]

51 minutes ago, cmarshall said:

In the ancient world reading meant reading aloud.  So, when St. Augustine (about 300 AD) went to visit St. Jerome he could hear Jerome reading to himself out loud before he got to his house.  If I remember correctly silent reading came in with the Renaissance.

That's quite interesting, i never thought about it.

I do not hear the text though, not in mother language nor when reading English.

Sometimes i get a physical image of the person who's talking.

[Stocky]

Just now, cmarshall said:

What about when you read about Thai immigration policy?  Or GDP?  Or other subject matter that lacks a visual dimension?

No, something as fleeting doesn't get visuals.

[cmarshall]

Just now, OneMoreFarang said:

I knew I hear the text but then I thought let's test the details so I read a couple of emails which I received recently from people I know. And somehow I "heard" the emails in the voice of the sender.

 

I remember a seminar with Paul Watzlawick a long time ago. He asked the audience a couple of easy multiplications and everybody should think about how they "get" the result. I.e. what is 3x4? Or 5x6? How do you get the result? Do you hear the result in your head? There are lots of different variations how this works. If you like think about it and I will tell the details in a later comment.

 

OP, I don't want to take over your thread but I think this is similar and interesting.

It is interesting.  Since both of my informants are Thais, I wondered if "hearing" the text is an aspect of Thai reading culture that is absent in the West.  Apparently, Westerners do it, too.  Surprising to me.  

 

I notice that when I read an email message from a correspondent who is not a particularly skilled writer I imagine the text as read by my friend which clears up most of the ambiguities.  But there are only a very few occasions of that kind.  

 

If you commonly "hear" the text are you a slow reader?  Do you like reading?  It would seem to me that you are doing a lot of extra work beyond merely grasping the concepts.  Among my two Thai informants, both of whom "hear" the text, one likes reading and reads a lot, the other not very much.

 

For the mental multiplication, the simple examples you cited don't require any calculation since we learned the multiplcation tables in the fourth grade.  If I have to estimate a quantity or actually perform mental arithmetic, such as 27 times 53, there are no voices or images involved at all.  

[Stocky]

2 minutes ago, cmarshall said:

If you commonly "hear" the text are you a slow reader?  Do you like reading?

No, I wouldn't consider myself a slow reader, and I like reading. It's one of my favourite pastimes. 

[Stocky]

1 hour ago, cmarshall said:

I was shocked and replied that I never heard the text as a voice, but only as experienced the concepts.

I'm having a hard time understanding this. So I'm curious, you asked me if I ever read anything other than fiction, I'd like to know if you ever read anything except non-fiction?

[cmsally]

It seems to be an accepted fact that visualisation is an important strategy for reading comprehension. I think it would be difficult to grasp a lot of reading material with no visualisation skills.

https://www.csi-literacy.com/blogs/blog/reading-strategies-visualizing

[cmarshall]

11 minutes ago, Stocky said:

I'm having a hard time understanding this. So I'm curious, you asked me if I ever read anything other than fiction, I'd like to know if you ever read anything except non-fiction?

I have read buckets of fiction since I was a literature major back in the day.  However, I seldom read fiction nowadays, preferring science, history, economics, anthropology, etc.  

 

I noticed that you seem to conceive of reading as largely or exclusively about visual things, such as people and places, which lend themselves readily to visualization, not abstractions.  This seemed odd to me because very little of what I myself read these days is susceptible of visualization.

 

By the way, "hearing" a text read silently is not what I would call visualization, at the least because it is not visual.  

Edited December 25, 2019 by cmarshall

[Stocky]

1 minute ago, cmarshall said:

I noticed that you seem to conceive of reading as largely or exclusively about visual things, such as people and places, which lend themselves readily to visualization, not abstractions.  This seemed odd to me because very little of what I myself read these days is susceptible of visualization.

I'm a geologist, so a lot of my work involves visualisation, most of the technical reports I read require me to build complicated 3D models in my head in order to understand them. I suspect my success as a geologist is in large part due to my ability to visualise. Indeed, my choice of geology as a career is likely because it allows me to visualise.

 

An interesting topic, it's given me a new insight into how others might think.

[cmarshall]

15 minutes ago, cmsally said:

It seems to be an accepted fact that visualisation is an important strategy for reading comprehension. I think it would be difficult to grasp a lot of reading material with no visualisation skills.

https://www.csi-literacy.com/blogs/blog/reading-strategies-visualizing

That might be true, but the article cited is unsubstantiated opinion.

[cmarshall]

3 minutes ago, Stocky said:

I'm a geologist, so a lot of my work involves visualisation, most of the technical reports I read require me to build complicated 3D models in my head in order to understand them. I suspect my success as a geologist is in large part due to my ability to visualise. Indeed, my choice of geology as a career is likely because it allows me to visualise.

 

An interesting topic, it's given me a new insight into how others might think.

That's interesting.  I would have guessed that quantitative information was already presented in 2D or 3D graphs or else that geologists would use tools to generate graphs, so that little mental modelling would be necessary.

 

I myself am probably somewhat deficient in visualizing since in my pre-GPS driving days I would get lost easily.  Even in the period when I did read a lot of fiction, the purely descriptive passages were seldom of particular interest.  The use of language or narrative technique was more to the point.

[Stocky]

18 minutes ago, cmarshall said:

By the way, "hearing" a text read silently is not what I would call visualization, at the least because it is not visual. 

Well it's both sound and vision, like the movies, there are pictures and a soundtrack. I don't visualise the words, I hear the words and the narration changes with each character, a woman will have a woman's voice a man a man's. If the character is Indian say there will be an Indian accent, if the character is a rural farmer he'll probably sound like Eddie Grundy. The narrative voice is accompanied by pictures, the visualisation of the characters and the places.

 

I must admit I thought everyone experienced books in a similar way.

[Stocky]

5 minutes ago, cmarshall said:

That's interesting.  I would have guessed that quantitative information was already presented in 2D or 3D graphs or else that geologists would use tools to generate graphs, so that little mental modelling would be necessary.

Yes, reports come with graphics. But I generate my own 3D image and where there are structural processes involved I will mentally manipulate the model to see if the interpretation works.

 

A large part of my work involves the creation of 3D interpretations using 3D modelling software, but you have to have a mental concept in order to build the 3D representation. 

Edited December 25, 2019 by Stocky

[cmarshall]

11 minutes ago, Stocky said:

Well it's both sound and vision, like the movies, there are pictures and a soundtrack. I don't visualise the words, I hear the words and the narration changes with each character, a woman will have a woman's voice a man a man's. If the character is Indian say there will be an Indian accent, if the character is a rural farmer he'll probably sound like Eddie Grundy. The narrative voice is accompanied by pictures, the visualisation of the characters and the places.

 

I must admit I thought everyone experienced books in a similar way.

Not at all like that for me.  For instance, when I read your post no image comes to mind nor does any sound of a voice, just concepts juxtaposed to give meaning.

 

In a similar way, if I read a^2 + b^2 = c^2, I suspect it is about a triangle, but I don't have an image of a triangle, although I can come up with one if necessary.  There is no voice and no triangle, just a relationship between quantities.

[BritManToo]

2 hours ago, cmarshall said:

It makes one wonder how varied are the experiences of silent reading.

It depends on how stupid you are.

You forgot "Do you move your lips as you read the words?"

My experiences are more 'mental imagery' than 'concepts' or 'voices', like a movie but in my head.

Edited December 25, 2019 by BritManToo

[Stocky]

28 minutes ago, cmarshall said:

For instance, when I read your post no image comes to mind

Nor for me, there's nothing to visualise, I just hear the words spoken - you have a slightly taciturn voice btw.

[OneMoreFarang]

1 hour ago, cmarshall said:

It is interesting.  Since both of my informants are Thais, I wondered if "hearing" the text is an aspect of Thai reading culture that is absent in the West.  Apparently, Westerners do it, too.  Surprising to me.  

 

I notice that when I read an email message from a correspondent who is not a particularly skilled writer I imagine the text as read by my friend which clears up most of the ambiguities.  But there are only a very few occasions of that kind.  

 

If you commonly "hear" the text are you a slow reader?  Do you like reading?  It would seem to me that you are doing a lot of extra work beyond merely grasping the concepts.  Among my two Thai informants, both of whom "hear" the text, one likes reading and reads a lot, the other not very much.

 

For the mental multiplication, the simple examples you cited don't require any calculation since we learned the multiplcation tables in the fourth grade.  If I have to estimate a quantity or actually perform mental arithmetic, such as 27 times 53, there are no voices or images involved at all.  

I enjoy reading. I read all the times novels, news, technical articles and books, etc.

In my experience I don't read significantly slower or faster than others. I tried some time ago to read faster without the hearing. Sometimes it kind of works. But I think this is more like skipping the information and not really reading. If I read a novel I want to "feel" the atmosphere. And if I read i.e. a technical articles I want to make sure I understand the details. So in both cases skipping does not make sense.

 

About the mental multiplication: Yes, they don't need any calculation. We know the result. And that is exactly the point of that experiment. How does the answer appear to us? If someone ask us for the result of 4x4 do you hear a voice which tells you 16? Or do you see a 16 somewhere in your imagination? Somehow the head tells us the result is 16 but the way this appears in different people's heads is different. Some hear it, some see it, and there are more variations.

[Stocky]

2 minutes ago, OneMoreFarang said:

If someone ask us for the result of 4x4 do you hear a voice which tells you 16? Or do you see a 16 somewhere in your imagination?

I hear it.