Inner Speech during Silent Reading Reflects the Reader's Regional Accent
By R. Filik, Emma Barber. 2011
64 citations recorded by the source corpus.
While reading silently, we often have the subjective experience of inner speech. However, there is currently little evidence regarding whether this inner voice resembles our own voice while we are speaking out loud. To investigate this issue, we compared reading behaviour of Northern and Southern English participants who have differing pronunciations for words like ‘glass’, in which the vowel duration is short in a Northern accent and long in a Southern accent. Participants' eye movements were monitored while they silently read limericks in which the end words of the first two lines (e.g., glass/class) would be pronounced differently by Northern and Southern participants. The final word of the limerick (e.g., mass/sparse) then either did or did not rhyme, depending on the reader's accent. Results showed disruption to eye movement behaviour when the final word did not rhyme, determined by the reader's accent, suggesting that inner speech resembles our own voice.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Linguistics
How researchers see this paper
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
In Developmental and Educational Psychology
- Ben Alderson-Day
- Charles Fernyhough
- E. Meins
- J. Lidstone
- Christopher Jarrold
- David M Williams
- Simon McCarthy-Jones
- Simon R. Jones
In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
In Linguistics
Citations in the corpus
- Inner Speech: Development, Cognitive Functions, Phenomenology, and Neurobiology (2015, background): “In a silent reading study, Filik and Barber (2011) compared eye movements in participants with northern or southern English accents when reading limericks.”