Mental Subvocalization --"Saying" Words In Your Mind As You Read

I suspect that I subvocalise only when I'm paying attention to my own thoughts. So it seems like I always subvocalise, just like it seems that the light in the fridge is always on.

I've always thought of written language (at least of the alphabetical/syllabary sort) as a kind of learned synesthesia. Certainly the results of the Stroop test on most people with typical neurology would suggest this...

Reading these responses I realized that I don't know what subvocalization is. I read at 500 wpm with good comprehension. I certainly hear the words when I read and I can't turn that off even if I go up to 800 wpm. But I can also count out loud while reading with not much effort. And I don't hear the words linearly as though someone was speaking really fast. I hear them sort of all at once in chunks like five words at a time.

Do I subvocalise?

Reading and counting interference poll.

Report the "best" performance of any language that you speak:

Can you read while counting out loud?

[pollid:610]

(No interference means that you can count while reading without any impact from one on the other)

Can you imagine a sentence read in a specific voice / accent? (e.g. professor Farnsworth, BBC commentary, etc)

[pollid:611]

Can you do that while counting out loud?

[pollid:612]

Do the answers differ for different languages?

[pollid:613]

I don't subvocalize, and read pretty darn quick. As a result, I tend not to think at all about how to pronounce character's names (esp in fantasy series) and treat the name more like a pictogram, and often have no idea how to say them when asked without pulling out the book and looking.

Do you subvocalize when reading in your native language? [pollid:607]

Try to read some text without subvocalizing. [pollid:608]

Try to read some text and subvocalize. [pollid:609]

I read in my native language without subvocalizing, and in English with subvocalizing. I can make an effort and read w/o subvocalization in English, but then I get an unpleasant feeling that I'm reading in a very shallow way, understanding and retaining much less than usual. I don't know for certain that this feeling is actually correct, but the evidence leans that way.

I was shown that I can reach effective reading speeds of something like thousands of words per minute, with decent retention, by quenching the subvocalization reflex and just forcing words to fly past my eyes. The trick is to stop every paragraph and summarize what you just read. Doing this is exhausting and I haven't kept up the skill.

Reading without sub-vocalization is impossible, although you may not notice you are doing it.

Here's the problem with that. You can't read without subvocalization. Carver and Rayner have both found that even the fastest readers all subvocalize. Even skimmers subvocalize key words. This is detectable, even among speed readers who think they don't do it, by the placement of electromagnetic sensors on the throat which pick up the faint nerve impulses sent to the muscles. Our brains just don't seem to be able to completely divorce reading from speaking.

skeptoid.com/episodes/4229

I'm more interested to know if you "say" or "hear" the words in your head as you read.

Thought you made a great distinction there, but I think maybe you missed it.

"Saying" is not the same as "hearing", and in the subvocalization business, people don't ordinarily make that distinction. I think I hear, but don't say, when reading.

One way I tried to test this was by humming while reading. If I were saying, I'd expect that to interfere with reading, while hearing would not. Tried the same while literally biting my tongue.

Reading felt the same to me with either intervention.

Try counting out loud while you're reading (idea stolen from Feynman).

I can read perfectly fine while counting, but I can't type while counting. I am typing this message while re-reading your post.

That you can hear words while reading doesn't necessarily indicate that you are sub-vocalizing, as you may be perceiving words at the post-word-parsing stage, with the individual syllables having never been produced by any mental process.

I don't subvocalize when I'm reading a narrative account, and my readings speed is 800-1200wpm. When I read poetry, textbooks on unfamiliar subjects, or in a non-native language, I do subvocalize and my reading speed is reduced to approx. 600-700wpm.

When I stop subvocalizing, the narrative turns into action in my head. I don't know what words I'm reading, but I see the characters playing out the actions the text describes. It's more like a dream than a movie, in that the images are not well fleshed out, and I only see what I am focusing on. Sometimes, I can see/feel concepts interacting, which is harder to describe but feels almost like a slightly psychedelic experience, as if I am absorbing the meaning without the medium. Reading like that is an actively pleasurable experience for me that is both meditative and exciting.

I don't sub-vocalize, as far as I can tell. I tend to read by just looking at the first letter of a word and then the shape of the word, rather then by reading phonetically; that's just how I taught myself to read, even before I stated learning to read in school. The upside is that I read much faster then most people seem to; the downside is that I'm terrible at spelling, and I tend to be bad at pronouncing words out loud if I've only read them and not heard them.

In fact, I've noticed before that I often think in written English rather then in audible English; I sometimes "see" words when I'm thinking to myself instead of "hearing" them.

I subvocalize, mentally, while "hearing" my thoughts, for example.

Is subvocalization is negatively correlated with getting a mental picture when reading fiction?

Hello, I'm Italian and I apologize in advance if I will be fairly straightforward, but it's because I'm tired .. and the reason is this general paranoia on: "Oh, I can hear my voice pronouncing the words .. Am I normal? Am I not efficient enough?" creating a multitude of anxious people about their own level of efficiency. I remind you that I'm Italian, my country has produced the best scientists, engineers, architects when the problem of subvocalizzazione did not even exist. As for me, I stopped to consider it a problem .. I subvocalize everything because if I did not it would simply be impossible for me to understand what I study: namely mathematics .. and challenge anyone to be able to read 800 words per minute on a math textbook, an extremely strict discipline, where EVERY single detail is important and every little mistake is able to overturn the result. Having said that, months ago I read an article about how to teach dyslexic children to develop an inner voice, the lack of which, that seems to be a common feature in these people, is the cause of poor reading. Is this not strange? Greetings.

Here are two projects that try to remove subvocalization. It's fun to try at least. http://www.spreeder.com/ http://learn2spritz.com/

If you aren't sure if you subvocalize while reading, try forcing yourself to imagine the words being read in a specific way - possibly in your friend's voice, or read in a certain easily stereotyped accent. Once you do that, you can see how different that feels from the reading you normally do.

When I try "reading in a Russian accent", my reading speed severely decreases, and the feeling is considerably more auditory than when I am reading with no gimmicks.

I do, but purely mentally. I have in past tried to avoid doing so, because it feels like a bottleneck in my mental speed, but I find I spend more time trying to not think the words than it saves me.

I'll add the weird datapoint that I normally subvocalize, but that I've been aware since age 10 that I can also read prose while singing along to music that I'm familiar with.

I just tried doing this right now and my observations yielded that I appear to not subvocalize when I do this and that I seem to therefore speed up and lose a bit of comprehension/retention. Which is going to be fine in lots of contexts, but is worth being aware of.

I've felt my OCD got worse after I learned touch typing during high school. Now I subvocalize every keystroke.

That's a great question - I didn't realise I did that, and better yet did not realise I could turn it off. Though I am interested to see if there is information on reduced comprehension, as I actively and slowly subvocalize just about all maths texts, and doubt if I there would be much benefit changing that.

I subvocalize. Can't turn it off.

I can change the voice, though. Some phrases are hard to not read in someone else's voice, like I tend to want to hear Feynman when I see "interesting" because I really like the way he says it.

I always do. I can't turn it off. I "hear" the words rather than saying them.

My top reading speed is about 900wpm, so it can't be slowing me down that much. When I read very quickly I only hear bits and pieces of each word though.

I can and often do skip the whole "hearing the text I'm reading" thing, but tend to enjoy slowing down and turning it back on for engaging, complicated, or fun texts. I also have a bad habit of skimming text instead of reading it if it's both boring and I'm not hearing what I read - I still get enough to decide whether or not it's worth remembering, just not enough to always recall it outright.

Augh! Normally I never subvocalize, but after reading this post I've started dong it uncontrollably and it's noticeably slowing down my reading speed. And my typing speed.

edit: well, not exactly never. I think I sometimes do it when I'm reading a challenging text while distracted/tired. It's usually a harbinger of the dreaded "same sentence over and over for 5 minutes", so I usually don't get far with subvocalizing. (Also, thankfully, it only took a few minutes of being distracted from this topic for the effect to go away. Whew.)

edit 2: even when this is in effect, I can still easily read while counting. I guess it's not really subvocalization after all.

I don't think I do much subvocalisation. There are certainly some words that I don't subvocalise: I often (like about once a week or a fortnight or so) have the experience of talking in person about a topic that I've previously only read and written about, and realising that I have never even tried to say key specialist vocabulary out loud, and so have no idea about how you pronounce it.

I don't subvocalise, and when I learned that other people do I was very surprised. A data point for subvocalisation being a limit on reading speed: I read at ~800wpm.

I always subvocalize everything.

I subvocalize parts of words and parts of sentences. Lumping everything from this strategy to hearing complete words and sentences under "subvocalization" might be a bit misleading. I stop noticing it when in deep concentration, but as you said this doesn't mean it's not happening. You stop noticing all sorts of stuff that's definitely happening when you concentrate, that's the point. Switching language from Finnish to English doesn't seem to have any effect.

As far as I can tell, I don't subvocalize while reading English.

I don't usually imagine a voice (my own or someone else's) when reading things. But I experience some kind of abstraction of having heard or said the word without a voice attached. I think out every syllable like this. Only when skimming do I not do this. My couple of experimental attempts to not do this while really getting the point of what I read just now were failures (I tried it on Slashdot news stories).

I always do. Mentally but not muscularly, and I can kind of suppress it if I consciously try. It is indeed the limiting factor on my reading speed.