This was really interesting! You probably already know this, but reading out loud was the norm, and silent reading unusual, for most of history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_reading That didn't really start to change until well after the invention of the printing press.

For most of my life, even now once in a while, I would subvocalize my own inner monologue. Definitely had to learn to suppress that in social situations.

This is very well written and compelling. Thanks for posting it!

I've went into a small rabbit hole about Chinese dyslexia after reading your comment where you treated each letter like a drawing instead of a letter, and it turns out that English and Chinese dyslexia probably affect different parts of the brain, and that someone who is dyslexic in alphabet-based systems (English) may not be dyslexic in logograph-based systems (Chinese).

For example, from the University of Michigans's dyslexia help website:

Wai Ting Siok of Hong Kong University has discovered that being dyslexic in Chinese is actually not the same as being dyslexia in English. Her team’s MRI studies showed that dyslexia among users of alphabetic scripts such as English versus users of logographic scripts such as Chinese was associated with different parts of the brain. Chinese reading uses more of a frontal part of the left hemisphere of the brain, whereas English reading uses a posterior part of the brain.

from a linguistics review in 2023:

Converging behavioral evidence suggests that, while phonological and rapid automatized naming deficits are language universal, orthographic and morphological deficits are specific to the linguistic properties of Chinese.  At the neural level, hypoactivation in the left superior temporal/inferior frontal regions in dyslexic children across Chinese and alphabetic languages may indicate a shared phonological processing deficit, whereas hyperactivation in the right inferior occipital/middle temporal regions and atypical activation in the left frontal areas in Chinese dyslexic children may indicate a language-specific compensatory strategy for impaired visual-spatial analysis and a morphological deficit in Chinese DD, respectively.

This made me wonder, since written Chinese has no connection with spoken Chinese, did people in ancient China mostly read aloud or read silently when reading by themselves? I'd expect that they didn't read out what they say.

Also, when I read Chinese as a second-language speaker, having learned English before Chinese, I often find that subvocalizing the Chinese characters helps me to understand it, and not doing so makes it difficult for me to read, however my Chinese-native parents don't have an inner voice when reading Chinese. 

I think the general differences in language processing between different types of languages is interesting, though I'm not sure how useful this is. Just my ramblings.

Classic 'typical mind' like experience: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizing-from-one-example [LW · GW]

I was diagnosed as a kid. I went through a. lot. of. therapy. Lots of special classes and making two thumbs up then pushing your knuckles together to make a bed that spells bed. That all helped a lot. But three things helped to the point where I hardly think about it these days.

1. Minecraft PVP servers. You need to be able to effectively communicate with your team and taunt the enemy. And you need to be able to do it while someone is running at you with a sword.

2. Fighting with Antivax people as a teenager on Facebook. The biggest slip up someone could make in a Facebook argument was mixing up “you’re” and “your”

3. Talking to girls I liked who could actually spell things correctly. I got very good at rapidly googling how to spell words as I was typing a response.

Unless I don’t recognize the sounds. It’s like asking me to beatbox the last 5 seconds of the gurgling of a nearby river. How the fudge would I do that?

Wait, are there people who can do that?

I think that's pretty easy :)

+1 for substituting brain processes. High-g neurodivergents of all flavors tend to run apps in the "wrong" parts of their brain to do things that neutotypicals do automatically. Low-g neurodivergents just fail at the tasks.

In college I was still reading out loud. Research papers have a voice. Mathematical equations especially. They take longer to say out loud than to read in your head, but you can never be sure what’s on the page if you don’t.

This is totally true. I am a professional mathematician, and I also have a strong "mental voice". Whenever I read mathematical texts/research papers with equations inline, I totally read the equations aloud in my head. It makes me wonder to what extent being dyslexic for English (or other written natural languages) fails to co-occur with being dyslexic for math-tongue (as distinct from dyscalculia, with AIUI has to do mostly with disability at mental calculation and mental manipulation of quantitative facts).

Maybe that description was too minimal to help anyone recreate the effect. What you do is you pretend the roman alphabet is a foreign alphabet. E.g. Kanji. Whenever you write or read, trace every stroke of the letter like you are illuminating an ancient manuscript. Channel your inner Sumi-E brush artist. Imagine yourself a true artisan of calligraphy. It’s a bit of a semi-meditative process of noticing every single stroke of every single letter. Yes, this is excruciatingly slow at first. Yes, it will be only kind of slow eventually. But, even better, you can probably still drop this technique at will and then just switch back and forth before high and low error modes of processing languages. Also, you are likely to lower your error rate in fast mode over time cause mental skills are porous. Or maybe magic? Anyway, it does seem to cross-over a bit. 

Also, I can read Korean and have had the distinct sensation of it being harder to make myself care about the differences between the characters, very early on; similarly, when practicing Chinese characters in class, I've seen a lot of classmates have a very hard time because they have to suddenly resort to having to treat the characters like they're pictures without even having the mental technology of how to do that correctly, so I wonder how much of dyslexia transfers cross-linguistically! Are there people who can read Cyrillic and Greek, but not Latin script or Hebrew? Who knows!

By the way, as an extremely verbally-fluent nondyslexic person who was also an excellent choral singer, I can confirm the superpowers of singing versus talking. For example:

• I can recite some Maori, Zulu, and a bunch of Hebrew, with only a vague idea what it means (I'm sure I once knew), because of a singing it in a variety of songs. (And like many singers I can recite large tracts of Christian liturgy in Latin; in fact to recite it in English I usually have to translate on the fly from Latin.)
• I memorised about 140 digits of pi just by having Hard 'n' Phirm's Pi Song on in the background and singing it; it took less than a week and almost no effort, if I recall correctly (and however many digits of tau 6.2831853071795864769252867665590 is took literally no effort, that was lodged in my memory after maybe two listens of Vi Hart's Tau and I wasn't even trying).
• Similarly there were some tedious mathematical formulae (the line element for differentiating in spherical polar coordinates, for example) which I "drilled" into my head by making up some nonsense tune for them and then repeating it about three times.

Thoroughly underused technique for minimal effort parroting.

As a fellow slight dyslexic (though probably a different subtype given mine seems to also have a factor of temporal physical coordination) who didn't know until later in life due to self-learning to read very young but struggled badly with new languages or copying math problems from a board or correctly pronouncing words I was letter transposing with - one of the most surprising things was that the anylytical abilities I'd always considered to be my personal superpowers were probably the other side of the coin of those annoyances:

Areas of enhanced ability that are consistently reported as being typical of people with DD include seeing the big picture, both literally and figuratively (e.g., von Károlyi, 2001; Schneps et al., 2012; Schneps, 2014), which involves a greater ability to reason in multiple dimensions (e.g., West, 1997; Eide and Eide, 2011). Eide and Eide (2011) have highlighted additional strengths related to seeing the bigger picture, such as the ability to detect and reason about complex systems, and to see connections between different perspectives and fields of knowledge, including the identification of patterns and analogies. They also observed that individuals with DD appear to have a heightened ability to simulate and make predictions about the future or about the unwitnessed past (Eide and Eide, 2011).

• Developmental Dyslexia: Disorder or Specialization in Exploration?

The last line in particular was eyebrow raising given my peak professional success was as a fancy pants futurist.

I also realized that a number of fields are inadvertently self-selecting away from the neurodivergency advantages above, such as degrees in certain eras of history which require multiple ancient language proficiencies, which certainly turned me off to pursuing them academically despite interest in the subject itself.

I remember discussing in an academic history sub I used to extensively partake in how Ramses II's forensic report said he appeared to be a Lybian Berber in relation to the story of Danaus, the mythological Lybian leader who was brother to a pharaoh with 50 sons, and the person argued that Ramses II may have had only 48 sons according to some inscriptions so it was irrelevant (for a story only written down centuries later). It was refreshing to realize that the difference of our perspectives on the matter, and clearly attitudes towards false negatives in general, was likely due to just very different brains.

This is practice sentence to you how my brain. I wonder how noticeable differences are to to other people.

That first sentence looks very bad to me; the second is grammatically correct but feels like it's missing an article. If that's not harder for you to understand than for other people, I still think there's a good chance that it could be harder for other dyslexic people to understand (compared to correct text), because I would not expect that the glitches in two different brains with dyslexia are the same in every detail (that said, I don't really understand what dyslexia means, though my dad and brother say they have dyslexia.)

the same word ... foruthwly and fortunly and forrtunaly

You appear to be identifying the word by its beginning and end only, as if it were visually memorized. Were you trained in phonics/phonetics as a child? (I'm confused why anyone ever thought that whole-word memorization was good, but it is popular in some places.) This particular word does have a stranger-than-usual relationship between spelling and pronunciation, though.

> I can do that too. Thankfully. Unless I don’t recognize the sounds.

My buffer seems shorter on unfamiliar sounds. Maybe one second.

> reading out loud got a little obstructive. I started subvocalizing, and that was definitely less fun.

I always read with an "auditory" voice in my head, and I often move my tongue and voicebox to match the voice (especially if I give color to that voice, e.g. if I make it sound like Donald Trump). I can't can't speed-read but if I read fast enough, the "audio" tends to skip and garble some words, but I still mostly detect the meanings of the sentences. My ability to read fast was acquired slowly through much practice, though. I presume that the "subvocalization" I do is an output from my brain rather than necessary for communication within it. However, some people have noticed that sometimes, after I say something, or when I'm processing what someone has told me, I visibly subvocalize the same phrase again. It's unclear whether this is just a weird habit, or whether it helps me process the meaning of the phrase. (the thing where I repeat my own words to myself seems redundant, as I can detect flaws in my own speech the first time without repetition.)

Really interesting! I particularly liked the part on reading out loud: even though I’d heard it used to be more common (and that there’s even a French 19th c. novelist who had set up a specific ‘shouting room’ in his garden for shouting his texts out loud and see if they sounded good), but I’d never actually noticed it had so many advantages. Maybe I should do it more. Heck, it might even help me stay focused more easily on what I read?

Is it not normal to sub vocalise?

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