Inner Voice Experiences During Processing of Direct and Indirect Speech

In this chapter, we review recent research concerned with “inner voice” experiences during silent reading of direct speech (e.g., Mary said, “This dress is beautiful!”) and indirect speech (e.g., Mary said that the dress was beautiful). Converging findings from speech analysis, brain imaging, and eye tracking indicate that readers spontaneously engage in mental simulations of audible-speech like representations during silent reading of direct speech, and to a much lesser extent during silent reading of indirect speech. This “simulated” implicit prosody is highly correlated with the overt prosody generated during actual speaking. We then compare this “simulated” implicit prosody with the sort of “default” implicit prosody that is commonly discussed in relation to syntactic ambiguity resolution. We hope our discussion will motivate new interdisciplinary research into prosodic processing during reading which could potentially unify the two phenomena within a single theoretical framework