I “hear” what you're “saying”: Auditory perceptual simulation, reading speed, and reading comprehension

Abstract

Auditory perceptual simulation (APS) during silent reading refers to situations in which the reader actively simulates the voice of a character or other person depicted in a text. In three eye-tracking experiments, APS effects were investigated as people read utterances attributed to a native English speaker, a non-native English speaker, or no speaker at all. APS effects were measured via online eye movements and offline comprehension probes. Results demonstrated that inducing APS during silent reading resulted in observable differences in reading speed when readers simulated the speech of faster compared to slower speakers and compared to silent reading without APS. Social attitude survey results indicated that readers’ attitudes towards the native and non-native speech did not consistently influence APS-related effects. APS of both native speech and non-native speech increased reading speed, facilitated deeper, less good-enough sentence processing, and improved comprehension compared to normal silent reading.

Keywords:

• Auditory perceptual simulation
• Embodied cognition
• Good-enough processing
• Language comprehension
• Reading
• Eye movements

Supplemental material

Supplemental material is available via the “Supplemental” tab on the article's online page (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2015.1018282).

We are grateful for the excellent work of the members of the Educational Psychology Psycholinguistics Lab, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, who assisted with data collection, especially Cassie Palmer, Heather Mauch, Nayoung Kim, and Mallory Stites. We also thank Ben Swets and an anonymous reviewer for their feedback.

Notes

¹The time duration for native speech: Text 1 = 2 min 50 s; Text 2 = 2 min 57 s; Text 3 = 2 min 49 s; Text 4 = 2 min 57 s. The time duration for non-native speech: Text 1 = 4 min 08 s; Text 2 = 4 min 18 s; Text 3 = 4 min 08 s; Text 4 = 4 min 20 s.

²We also examined the auditory re-presentation effect in Experiment 3. The results replicated the patterns in Experiment 2. Participants’ memory of the “speakers” gradually faded away as the time went on and then returned after re-presentation. See “auditory re-representation effect in Experiment 3” in the Supplemental Material for details.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) [CAREER Award BCS-0847533 to Kiel Christianson].