Hearing Story Characters' Voices: Auditory Imagery During Reading

Despite the longstanding belief in an inner voice, there is surprisingly little known about the perceptual features of that voice during text processing. This article asked whether readers infer nonlinguistic phonological features, such as speech rate, associated with a character's speech. Previous evidence for this type of auditory imagery has been found, but only when reading was preceded by an explicit auditory presentation of the character's voice (Alexander & Nygaard, 2008; Kurby, Magliano, & Rapp, 2009). Three experiments included a fast condition in which the main character was described as speaking quickly and a slow condition in which the main character was described as speaking slowly. When reading aloud, participants in the slow condition read slower. However, when reading silently, participants in the slow condition read slower only when instructed to think about the character's voice. This work concludes that auditory images of speech rate information are not routinely formed during silent reading.