Culture and Society
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As you read these words, do you hear them being narrated inside your head? If so, whose voice are you listening to?
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.Chances are you probably do experience each word as though it were literally being read to you by some miniature being who lives inside your brain. Research has shown that the majority of people have what’s known as an “inner reading voice” (IRV), although not everyone shares this characteristic and the nature of this internal bookworm can vary from person to person.
The two most significant studies on this subject were conducted by New York University Professor of Psychology Ruvanee Vilhauer, who first began to unravel the nature of IRVs after scanning the internet for reports of people’s reading experiences. Based on a series of 136 posts, she determined that 82.5 percent of people do hear a voice when they read, and that these IRVs almost always “have the auditory qualities of overt speech, such as recognizable identity, gender, pitch, loudness and emotional tone.”
Around half of those who experienced IRVs heard only one voice – typically their own – although some people claimed to have multiple narrators inside their head. For instance, when reading dialog, the imagined voices of different characters would sometimes take the mic, while letters, emails and other written communication from friends or family can be read internally using the sender’s voice.
In a subsequent paper, Vilhauer used questionnaires to assess the phenomenon in 570 volunteers, around four-fifths of whom reported always or sometimes hearing IRVs when reading. Curiously, however, the remaining 20 percent said they simply “understood words being read without hearing an inner voice.”
Of those who did have an IRV, 34.2 percent said they heard this voice every time they read something, while 45 percent heard their inner reader “often”. Interestingly, 19 percent said they could choose whether to activate their IRV or keep it muted while reading.
Almost three-quarters of respondents claimed to be able to control certain aspects of their IRV, with 35.6 percent saying they could choose whose voice was heard, while 36.5 percent could alter the volume.
A separate study has indicated that people typically hear an internal voice that shares their own accent when reading, which can sometimes make a big difference to the quality of the text. For example, poems and limericks may or may not rhyme depending on how a person pronounces certain vowels, and silent reading can therefore influence the delivery of these art forms in the same way as vocal performance.
On a related note, online discussion has recently highlighted the fact that not everyone possesses an internal monologue, which means that while some people silently narrate some or all of their thoughts using language, others have a less verbose way of thinking. Strangely, this topic has received very little scientific attention and remains largely under-studied, probably because most people assume that everyone thinks like they do, which means it simply hasn’t occurred to many researchers to actually study this phenomenon.
