No, reading silently to oneself. When I read, the words I’m reading essentially become part of my inner monologue, but that’s not true for my wife.
So for example she has words that she knows the meaning of and can use them correctly in writing, but she doesn’t use them when speaking and doesn’t have a pronunciation for them because she’s never thought about how they might sound. She can pronounce them if prompted, and recognizes them when I speak them, but she will sometimes be surprised to hear a word that she only knows from reading/writing. I have had the experience of being surprised because a word is pronounced differently from how I thought it was pronounced, but she reports having no pronunciation at all for words she has only read.
I think it’s similar to a speed-reading technique where you read while engaging your vocal chords to disengage your inner monologue (c.f. saying ‘om’ while meditating). That’s how I imagine her experience of reading.
That is indeed strange. Because there is no way that word got into her “head” without actually reading it. Actually reading it requires pronunciation. Or do you know of situations where someone learns the song without actually hearing it (by reading sheet music), like they can learn the motions their fingers (or whatever) would take on the instrument, but the actual song they know nothing about?
This makes more sense and doesn’t exclude pronunciation:
If she ever pronounces them wrong at first, the wrong pronunciation is how she pronounced it in her head.
She wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between how it is in her head and how it is for others if she didn’t have one recorded in her head.
She does have one recorded in her head or she wouldn’t even know that was the same word. She would just think she was learning a new word.
I don’t doubt that deaf people can learn the motions/feelings of music and the unheard meaning of words, but that isn’t the same as what we’re talking about here. They do this via a different route.
Maybe that different route kicks in for words for which we have no pronunciation because they are new to us, and we forget a pronunciation we tried just long enough to get past the word, and that pronunciation was not reinforced by repetition? That is the only possible way I can imagine she would report not having a pronunciation for the word.
I would have thought this, but her experience is evidence to the contrary. If she can look at a collection of words and understand it (e.g. she can follow written directions or get factual information from writing), I would say she’s read it.
Music is an auditory phenomenon, so I don’t think this comparison is apt. Written music isn’t music in the way that written language is language.
That’s what I would have thought, but I believe her when she says it’s not the case. She knows how to translate words she hears into writing, so she may be connecting the sound to the writing that way. And because she understands the written word, and she has a meaning associated with, if she hears a word that in context seems to have that same meaning it would make it easier to notice that it corresponds to a written word she knows.
A good example (coincidentally one that came up last night) is that she doesn’t understand double entendres in writing. So sometimes she’ll read a joke and not understand it, and then ask me what it means, and in the process of asking me she’ll say it out loud, and then immediately get it. When she says it out loud, she’s hearing it for the first time, implying that she doesn’t hear it when she reads it.
Similarly, she often doesn’t notice rhymes or sound-alikes in writing (unless she’s familiar with them or they are spelled the same), which makes sense if she isn’t experiencing their pronunciation when she reads them.
I’ve also noticed she tends to talk to herself while she’s writing, which I think makes sense if she doesn’t have the experience of pronunciation from the written words.
I was also thinking about deaf people, and I’m really curious how kids who are born deaf are taught to read. I would imagine it’s difficult, because writing really does encode speech. Maybe it’s similar to how people learn to read non-phonetic languages like Chinese, i.e. essentially memorizing characters. I know there are literacy pedagogies that teach ‘whole word’ reading and don’t do phonics, but as I understand it they are not as effective as phonics.
And actually, I know a few Chinese characters and I can ‘read’ them in the sense of understanding what they mean even though I don’t know how to pronounce them. I’m not sure what my experience of that is like, maybe I’m just pronouncing the English translation in my head when I read them? I’ll try to notice the next time I see one.
Taking this line a bit out of context, but I think this is an important way of thinking about these kinds of things. We have different routes by which we process the world, and most people have similar routes in how they process certain kinds of information. But if people somehow get wired to use a different route, the results can be surprising. Brains are plastic, so brain structures used for one task can be repurposed for another task, but the original structure still exerts itself.
In the case of my wife, the more I think about this part of her, the more it seems to accord with other parts of her mind. For example, she’s incredibly observant and perceptive. If her experience of reading is of going directly from visual signals to meaning without a translation into sound, it would make sense to allow a generalization into non-language visual inputs that also convey meaning. So when she ‘reads a room’, the experience may be a lot closer to literal reading for her than it is for me.
(Sorry, I feel like I’m gushing. I like thinking about her )
I can do both, but when I am thinking about it, I tend to speak out the words in my head. When not conscious of my reading (if you know what I mean) I get the meaning of the words without “hearing” them. Hearing them means reading more slowly.
I understand that some people claim they cannot visualise object internally in a similar way. I would also add the same codisil to that reflection.
The internal representation of language in deaf people is really fascinating. Sign language doesn’t even directly map to English, even apart from vocabulary it has a distinct grammar and syntax. A deaf person that can speak ASL and read English is effectively bilingual.
I have to assume that some part of the brain’s auditory processing is used in producing and understanding sign language, because I think we really do hear voices and language differently from how we hear other sounds. It could be that people born deaf experience dance the way hearing people experience music.
Super neat to speculate about, I’ll have to look for some subjective reports.
I have the same experience. I think I may be particularly bad at suppressing that inner voice, I’ve tried various speed-reading techniques to force it and my retention is next to zero, even with practice. I’m a very slow reader (at least considering how much I read), but above average comprehension and retention.
FJ, I answered your question in the rest of what I wrote that you didn’t read.
Carleas… you talk about your wife like she is a specimen that you study, and you should’ve got educated about things before you began. But she appears to like it that way, so. I guess you’re good for each other.
I love this thing about myself, when I am reading something really special.
I’ve read Lord of the Rings three times, and I read at speaking voice. In my head the second time was Ian Holm as he played Frodo in the 1979 BBC Radio production of LOTR. The Third time was this century and Ian Macellen was in my head,
Re-readings of Asimov often come with his voice. First time I read the Asomov books I had not idea what he looked like, but I’d subsequently seen him interviewed on TV.
You acknowledge that deaf people can understand the meaning of words. What is that if not reading? You have a very strange vocabulary around this topic, if that isn’t “reading” to you.
If I look at the words you wrote, and understand what they mean, I’m reading.
Why are you saying that? He’s literally telling you his wife reads without sound of any sort, not even imagined pronunciation. Why are you so confident about what you’re saying, that you will literally just contradict someone’s lived experience? “You don’t experience reading like that, I, Ichthus, know what you experience better than you do”.
And the fact that deaf people can read should be a pretty big hint to you that you shouldn’t be so arrogant in your view here. They are obviously definitive proof that people can, in fact, read without real or imagined pronunciation.
Am I? What am I misrepresenting? So you’re going to tell Carleas wife what she experiences when she reads, and now you’re going to tell me what my purposes are too? I didn’t realise you had such mind reading abilities.
…he’s literally not knowing what he’s talking about (sarcasm).
The way stuff gets encoded is how you do it in your head. I already said everything I have to say on that particular topic. In his reply that I barely replied to he had way more false assumptions that would take even longer for me to explain why he is wrong. He’s doing it on purpose, and you’re doing what you’re doing on purpose. End of conversation.
Great, I look forward to not hearing more from you about this lol.
@Carleas I am curious though what it would take for me to try to learn to read without mentally sounding it out, and how that would change the experience of reading.
I have a similar experience. If I’ve seen a movie before reading the book, the characters usually have the voices of their actors. But I prefer reading the book first, so I can cast the voices myself. Ever since listening to the Sapiens and Homo Deus audiobooks, most nonfiction books are narrated by Derek Perkins.
It’s come in handy when reading to my kids: I use voices for characters by doing my best impression of whoever I hear in my head, and I can easily keep track of what voice I’m using for each character.
Flannel Jesus is right that deaf people who can read are an existence proof that it’s possible; to the extent that we would reject the claim just because we can’t imagine what the experience would be like, that should update toward accepting the claim.
But Ichthus also has a point that in the case of deaf people, there’s a significant intervention that makes it possible. Since english writing is based on pronouncing, we have good reason to expect that someone who can pronounce would automatically do it as part of parsing reading.
I also don’t know what deaf peoples’ experience of reading is like, maybe they do ‘pronounce’ as the read by imagining the signs associated with the words they’re reading. I doubt that’s the case, fluently bilingual people don’t typically translate to their mother tongue to understand their second language. But not knowing what deaf people do experience, we could leave the question open.
But talking to my wife about this, she reminded me that when she was young (kindergarten, so early reading years), she had a verbal idiosyncrasy where she couldn’t/didn’t pronounce the letter ‘R’, replacing it with a ‘W’ sound. Most important for this conversation, she had speech therapy because the adults in her life were worried that the mispronunciation would make it harder for her to learn to read. She doesn’t remember much about what speech therapy was like, but speculated that maybe either the speech therapy or the mispronunciation itself led her to disconnect reading from pronunciation.
So, as in the case of deaf people, there could be an intervention in her case that lead her mind to develop along an unusual path.
@Ichthus, how do you distinguish this from the aphantasia you mentioned earlier (the lack of mental images)? I find them very similar (I even suspect my wife has some degree of general auditory aphantasia).
(EDIT: sorry, meant to reply to this)
The closest I’ve come is empty vocalizing while moving my eyes over the words – saying ‘om’ or really just groaning. Something about making noise with my vocal chords that’s different from what I’m reading that prevents me from ‘hearing’ the words without preventing me from understanding them. I’m not sure this would still work for me; after reading out loud to my kids daily for almost a decade I’ve noticed that I can carry on a separate inner monologue while I’m reading out loud with minimal impact on the fluency of either.
I think I’ve seen it claimed that for many people it’s possible to infer what they’re reading by monitoring electrical impulses in their speech muscles, because even if you aren’t moving your lips there’s still an increase in electrical activity corresponding to what you’re reading. That would be a interesting test to run on deaf readers and people like my wife.
You may be interested to hear this. The blind woman I know detects people they want to partner with by their scents. They have heightened senses for hearing and smell.
I sometimes ponder that the greatest genius on earth was Helen Kellar.
I wonder how much of our meaning is learned and how much is triggered? I think about this every time I think about animal language compared to human language, and DNA in general.
Obviously, it wouldn’t apply to things that just spring about in our generation, so you could rule all that out…unless the future is somehow encoded. Like some kind of pre-established harmony.
It’s funny. I’m reviewing what Brentano had to say about Leibniz.
He mentions how we don’t hear a single drop of water, we hear the roaring of the surf. You could say the same thing about light. We don’t see a single photon, we see all the reflections coming back to us. We see a statistic that is (perhaps) digitized into perception. We don’t have the resolution power to see the details/population, but we wouldn’t have the perception if they weren’t there.
Just a stab.
…and totally not the same thing Carleas was talking about, so pardon the rabbit hole.
One way I can relate to it is when I learn a song on the piano by ear, or a way of typing… my fingers learn the motions in a way where if I start thinking about how I learned it in the first place (or if my body is postured/positioned differently than it was postured/positioned when I learned it), it interrupts the flow, and my “fingers” forget how to do it (more like my brain forgets how to tell my fingers how to do it… or something… like the coordination/connection/communication between my fingers and a relevant part of my brain is lost). There was one time I forgot my password, but my fingers remembered it. Sometimes I can only remember the syllables of a word and have to say the syllables out loud in order to remember the word. It is called, as I’m sure you know, embodied cognition. It involves positional perception. Motor neurons.
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