Evidence for Prosody in Silent Reading

Abstract

English speakers and expressive readers emphasize new content in an ongoing discourse. Do silent readers emphasize new content in their inner voice? Because the inner voice cannot be directly observed, we borrowed the capemphasis technique (e.g., "to MAY to") from the pronunciation guides of dictionaries to elicit prosodic emphasis. Extrapolating from linguistic theories of focus prosody in spoken English, we predicted and found that silent readers in experiment 1 preferred cap-emphasized, newsworthy content ("James stole the BRACELET ") when the just-read story left them wondering what was stolen (compared with control trials). Readers preferred " JAMES stole the bracelet" when left wondering who the thief was. Experiment 2 generalized our findings to newsworthy function words and to a new behavioral measure, reaction time. As predicted, "He CAN " was judged more quickly and accurately following "Can he swim," whereas " HE can" was judged more quickly and accurately following "Who can swim?" Our results suggest that readers engage focus prosody when they read silently.

Accent mark and visual word recognition in Spanish

“…In free-stress languages such English, Italian or Spanish, the nonlexical route should involve the use of rules not only about how to read segments, but also where to assign lexical stress, since it has been showed that readers impose lexical stress and intonation during silent reading (e.g., Ashby & Clifton, 2005;Gross, Millett, Bartek, Bredell, & Winegard, 2013), and that lexical stress plays a role in lexical access (e.g., Soto-Faraco, Sebastián-Gallés, & Cutler, 2001). Although this is not an easy task in languages with unpredictable stress (such as English or Italian), some models have successfully integrated rules to assign lexical stress (see, for example, Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2010;Rastle & Coltheart, 2000;Ševa, Monaghan, & Arciuli, 2009, for English;and Pagliuca & Monaghan, 2010;Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2014, for Italian).…”

Marking Stress ExPLICitly in Written English Fosters Rhythm in the Reader's Inner Voice

“…It is possible that our readers were responding to other linguistic features that systematically covaried with our experimental manipulations of prosodic meter. Nonetheless, our claims about a rhythmic inner voice are strengthened by testing specific predictions drawn from linguistic theory, by exploiting different stimuli (e.g., poems with different meters, heteronyms in prose), and by generalizing our previous research in silent reading on focus prosody (Gross et al., ) to prosodic meter and lexical stress. Third, the design of our experiments cannot tease apart interference and facilitation effects, because the experimental design lacks a plain text control condition.…”

“…Emerging evidence suggests that silent readers represent in the inner voice the prosodic features of phrasing (Bader, ; Hwang & Schafer, ), lexical stress (Ashby & Clifton, ; Ashby & Rayner, ), meter (Breen & Clifton, , ), and focal stress (Gross, Millett, Bartek, Bredell, & Winegard, ), consistent with the implicit prosody hypothesis (Fodor, ). By observing eye movements, Ashby and Clifton found that polysyllabic words with two stressed syllables were read more slowly and received more fixations than did polysyllabic words with one stressed syllable.…”

“…English speakers (Bolinger, ; Nava & Zubizarreta, ; Rooth, ; Schafer, Speer, Warren, & White, ) and expressive readers (Cooper, Eady, & Mueller, ; Eady & Cooper, ; Schwanenflugel, Westmoreland, & Benjamin, ) acoustically emphasize new or important content. Thus, Gross and colleagues () tested how contextual newness might implicitly influence the inner voice. Silent readers were predicted to give higher helpfulness ratings for the final sentences of a paragraph when new or important content was emphatically marked and previously given information was not, compared with incongruously matched stimuli.…”

“…The stylistic alterations used by Gross and colleagues () could be used to test hypotheses about individual differences in rhythm and stress extraction during silent reading. There is emerging evidence for individual differences in the syntactic, and accompanying prosodic, analyses of sentences.…”