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Subvocalization versus auditory imagery11/18/2023 ![]() It is only when the voice is not mine that one is left to wonder what the underlying thought and meaning is. In analogy to ordinary overt speech: When the voice is mine, the thought is mine as well. The more one is engaged in what X could mean, the less one can possibly be engaged in the saying of X, and vice versa. This is due to a trade-off between one’s degree of openness to interpretation on the one hand and one’s bodily appropriation of the discourse on the other. On the level of higher-order meaning-making, outer and inner reverberations link with the presence or absence of spontaneous interpretation, respectively. As a consequence, inner reverberations entail a sense of medium opacity, while outer reverberations may rather be associated with a relative sense of medium transparency. More generally, then, inner reverberations can be said to result from the language of an utterance appearing markedly non-situated. However, the cuing process is subject to many variables pertaining to the text, the individual reader, and the specific reading session. By contrast, inner reverberations may be more likely to occur with discourse particularly lacking in such cues. Outer reverberations may effectively be prompted by textual cues such as oral style, speaker familiarity, and situational embedding. Although outer reverberations can feature some kinesthetic qualities such as a sense of resonance in the reader’s torso, kinesthetic experience is much more pronounced in inner reverberations, and felt motor activity in the articulatory apparatus is a distinctive trait of inner reverberations alone. While outer reverberations represent text as situated speech and may accommodate perceptual detail of the imaginary voice, inner reverberations rather tend to represent text as raw language, where the only auditory qualities to be explored are those of first-person (subvocal) speech production. Meanwhile, inner reverberations reach the mind’s ear via subvocal rehearsal, i. e., covert articulatory activity in the reader’s mouth and throat. Outer reverberations put the reader in the position of a vicarious listener, feeding on activity in the mind’s ear only. The two ends will be referred to as outer and inner reverberations. But as we begin to study narrative VAI experiences in greater detail, they soon fall into two distinct types, or more precisely, position themselves between two ends of a continuum. This description of VAI, however apt, is not very elaborate. But what is it like, in terms of embodiment, to consciously experience VAI? The basic felt quality of all VAI is that the linguistic medium of a written narrative enters the reader’s awareness qua spoken discourse. Spontaneous literary interpretation stands for any process of meaning-making, however inarticulate, that reaches the reader’s consciousness in an uninterrupted course of reading.Īlthough the necessity of phonological access for the silent processing of print is disputed, the experimental contexts in which VAI has proven to depend on lower-order embodied processes, and/or to have a pronounced effect on silent reading, are countless. e., that discrete types of VAI are associated with discrete tendencies in spontaneous literary interpretation. The central argument is that distinctions within the domain of embodied VAI also apply to higher-order meaning-making, i. More generally, the aim is to isolate a new set of embodied experiences which, along with more widely researched phenomena such as sensorimotor enactment or emotion, contribute to our understanding of literary narrative. This is a first attempt to provide a systematic theoretical account of the felt qualities and underlying cognitive mechanics of VAI, based on convergent evidence from the experimental cognitive sciences, psycholinguistic theory, and introspection. Verbal auditory imagery (VAI) in the silent reading of narrative prose, on the other hand, is mostly neglected by literary and other theorists. It is generally acknowledged that verbal auditory imagery, the reader’s sense of hearing the words on a page, matters in the silent reading of poetry.
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