Voices in reading literature

Abstract

Building upon recent studies of historical reading practices and their insights into the bodily and cognitive nature of reading, this article explores the impact of silent and voiced reading on the diverse bodily, cognitive, and emotional engagements with a text. Our starting point is that language is not merely a tool for translating mental content but emerges from and shapes embodied ways of interacting with the world, in this case, a reading-world. First, we present a phonetic analysis based on a pilot study of university students' voiced and silent reading. The overall cognitive act of articulating phonemes based on perception of graphemes is portrayed as an embodied process, particularly evident in instances where readers modify their pronunciation of unfamiliar words or grapheme clusters. Moreover, we observe how readers embody emotions and differentiate between narrators or voices in the text by creatively and dynamically modulating their oral cavity to produce subtle, yet cognitively significant changes in speech sounds. Second, drawing on interview data from the same study, we explore how the two reading conditions influence experiential factors, including perceptions of time, qualities of imagery, and the multiplicity of voices enacted by the reader. Together, these aspects provide insights into the function and value of readers' practices of reading silently and aloud. While, in our study, reading aloud helps modulating local sensitivity to prosodic features that are important for e.g. emotion regulation and comprehension, readers more easily orient themselves in a text when reading silently, strengthening the in-depth experience of settings, characters, and narrators. While the attributes of silent and voiced reading may vary based on expertise, norms, and personal preferences, each mode appears to offer distinctive advantages. We thus conclude by proposing that readers could benefit from alternating between both reading modes, adapting to the specific task at hand. This approach allows for the full realisation of the embodied potential in alignment with the requirements of the task. Additionally, historical practices of reading aloud can inform the study of reading modes, providing a repertoire of possibilities absent in today's reading ecologies dominated by silent reading.