WHAT THE READERS EYE TELLS THE MINDS EAR - SILENT READING ACTIVATES INNER SPEECH

Although copious research has investigated the role of phonology in re ading, little research has investigated the precise nature of the enta iled speech representations. The present study examined the similarity of ''inner speech'' in reading to overt speech. Two lexical decision experiments (in which participants gave speeded word/nonword classific ations to letter strings) assessed the effects of implicit variations in vowel and word-initial consonant length. Responses were generally s lower for phonetically long stimuli than for phonetically short stimul i, despite equal orthographic lengths. Moreover, the phonetic length e ffects displayed principled interactions with common factors known to affect lexical decisions, such as word frequency and the similarity of words to nonwords. Both phonetic length effects were stronger among s lower readers. The data suggest that acoustic representations activate d in silent reading are best characterized as inner speech rather than as abstract phonological codes.