Cognitive psych brown bag, Wednesday, 4/3, 12-1:15, Tobin 521B
Kiel Christianson
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
College of Education
Title: Said fast, read fast: Perceptual simulation during silent reading
Abstract:
Skilled readers often experience "hearing" a voice inside their heads when they read. This "inner speech" is characteristic of skilled reading, and appears to be derived from the phonological representations generated during the grapheme-to-phoneme conversion process. Readers also seem to create an implicit metrical structure during silent reading. Recent research demonstrates that higher-level features are also generated under certain circumstances, perhaps approximating a more veridical representation of oral speech. This phenomenon has been termed "perceptual simulation." For example, direct quotations described as being said quickly are read faster than those described as being said slowly (Stites, Luke, & Christianson, 2013; Yao & Scheepers, 2011). In this talk, I will describe this perceptual simulation effect, demonstrate its occurrence with a wider variety of texts and "speaker" characteristics, and consider the connection between perceptual simulation and reading comprehension.
