When you’re reading, do you hear your voice (or someone else’s) speaking the words? If someone tells you a story do you “see” the events taking place?
For me, it’s yes to the first, and kind of for the second. If I’m reading, or listening to someone tell me about something that happened, I “see” snapshots or little clips of what the person is saying. It’s annoying when an author describes a character’s physical features a few chapters into the book, because I’ve all ready “seen” him or her with different features.
With non-fiction books, and books written in the first-person I “hear” the words in my inner reading voice, which is different than my speaking voice. If it’s book written in the third-person, every character “says” the words in their own voice.
inspired by the side conversation about reading voices in this thread.
After years of experience of reading fiction the ‘voice’ has become almost totally subconscious. When I read it’s as if the story is bypassing my inner voice and is playing visually in my head, even when characters are talking. The best I can describe it is it’s as if I’m ‘watching’ the story, ‘watching’ rather than ‘listening to’ the characters talking.
I don’t have an inner reading voice, but visualise more or less everything on the page, this applies to both fiction and non-fiction and to a much more vivid extent when someone is telling me a story.
I do not have an inner voice when I read. I simply can’t talk fast enough in my head. My eyes only stop a few times on each line of text. The meaning somehow just pops into my head. I don’t pretend to understand how this works. While this allows me to read quickly, it causes a few problems. Words that I don’t know simply don’t exist to my eye unless my reading “crashes” and I have to go back and reread a sentence. If what I’m reading becomes too weird (like if I’m reading a quantum mechanics textbook) I’ll sometimes end up just looking at the words in order without really understanding a thing.
If I’m reading a story, I definately see the story. My memory of the story is of my vision of what happened and of my understanding of what happened. I have no memory of the actual text.
Sometimes (and almost always when some sort of unusual or pronounced accent is implied), but sometimes not.
Individual characters will have their own voices as long as I put a bit of thought into “creating” a voice for them. Otherwise their voices default to my “narrator” voice which is, interestingly enough, the exact same voice that I do all my thinking with (for those components of my thought process that require a voice at all).
Oddly enough, though, I’ll sometimes read a word (normally an unusual character name) without attaching any pronunciation to it at all. I don’t remember which book it was, but I first noticed this when the subject of the pronunciation of a character’s name came up (in the book). I suddenly realized that, not only did I not know that that was how their name was supposed to be pronounced, but I hadn’t had any concept of the pronunciation at all before that point. I had been reading their name more as a symbolic arrangement of characters than as a word with an actual pronunciation. I still do that, too. If I have no idea how a word is supposed to be pronounced, I’ll just start reading it as a visual symbol instead of a normal word, without even noticing that I’m doing it. Pretty weird.
Kind of. I have flashes of images when something in the story has a visually relevant component, or when certain visually-oriented adjectives are used, but it’s nothing like the internal visualization I get when I’m actually trying to visualize something.
I should also point out that, like my internal thought processes, anything read in my default “narrator” voice ends up being partially verbal and partially meaning-oriented. In other words, I’ll “hear” some words, but other times I’ll just grasp their meaning without actually “hearing” the words themselves. The more normal the concept, the more likely I am to absorb the meaning without “hearing” the words.
For example, if I were to read: “Billy drove his car to the store,” I wouldn’t “hear” any of the words. Driving to the store is such a normal occurrence that my brain manages to distill the sentence down to it’s base meaning with very little interpretation needed.
On the other hand, “Xor D’lazk hurriedly realigned the engine’s positron bypass array, managing to stabilize the matter-antimatter reaction chamber at the last possible second,” tends to need some translation by the higher levels of my brain before I can parse the exact meaning. Do I know what a “positron bypass array” is? Has the story mentioned it before? If not, can I make an educated guess? And what do positrons have to do with matter-antimatter reactions, anyway? etc.
Also, the name “Xor D’lazk” is a prime candidate for my aforementioned tendency to see strange words as visual arrangements of character rather than as actual words.
Thanks :o
You know, I had debated having a sig at all. I’ve seen too many people waste space with giant sig images on less . . . enlightened . . . message boards, and that kind of turned me off to sigs entirely. That’s actually one reason that I’m glad the SDMB doesn’t allow inline images.
Not usually, except with poetry or poetic prose that demands to be read slowly, or sometimes with the work of an author whose actual voice I’m familiar with (like Garrison Keillor).
Sometimes, to a greater or lesser extent, depending partly on the descriptive powers of the author.
When I’m getting “warmed up,” I hear a voice, and it has an English accent (I’m American). Once I really get going in a long piece–usually fiction–I am reading about four lines at one time, so the voice turns off and images combined with conceptual understanding take over.
Yes, I almost always read things (even on this messageboard) in a generic narrator voice. Even when I go back to read my own writings, I hear them in a different voice than my real one.
As for visualizations, usually I only form a mental image of people if the author has given a description of them.
Not really. I’ll get an impression of the tone of a voice - so I have an idea of how a character should sound, but unless a line really strikes me, I just process it. I am a very fast reader (I’ll devour a bit of light fluff, like a romance novel, in about 2-3 hours.) and if I had to “hear” the words in my head, it would drive me nuts, and slow me down considerably.
Actually, I find, perhaps because I don’t have the inner voice so many others here have been talking about, that to get a good experience of poetry I must read it aloud. I don’t mind, really, since I do think poetry is supposed to be spoken, but it is something that’s made a few poeple look at me oddly.
I hate it when I get the “voice thing” when I’m reading! It slows me down so I’m actually reading no faster than I would be if I really were reading out loud.
Usually for textbooks/ case readings I have an inner reading voice. But for fiction, I am voiceless. In fact, that usually hinders me if I’m reading Sci-fi or Fantasy. For example, when I was reading a Star Wars EU book, I never sounded out the word Noghri I just recognized the letter pattern to mean those creepy assassin aliens. After my brother read the book too, I had difficulty verbalizing the alien names when we talked.
