Thread: Whose voice do you hear when you read silently?

Earl Hamner, Jr. aka John Boy Walton. It's a curse. And every book ends with "Good night mama, good night John Boy, good night Mary Ellen, good night John boy...." Well, you get the picture!

RT

I don't hear voices. (Am I normal?)


It's more of a silent understanding of the words I'm looking at. I imagine it's the same way a deaf person reads.

Originally Posted by BrianB

I don't hear voices. (Am I normal?)


It's more of a silent understanding of the words I'm looking at. I imagine it's the same way a deaf person reads.

I don't know what's normal here ---- maybe you're quite advanced.


Justin

I read a lot and can answer this unequivocally: With novels/non-fiction it's always my voice (sometimes putting on different voices for different characters in a novel. You should hear my Captain Ahab - sounds a lot like my Captain Nemo, but nothing like my Atticus Finch....)

But 50% of my time is spent reading journal articles, technical texts and monographs, etc to do with mathematics and statistics. There's no voice in my head at all when I read this stuff. Interestingly (maybe), when I write articles or book chapters or whatever to do with my research, I hear my voice dictating in my head - formulae and proofs are exactly the same as text.

James.

I have a hard enough time reading while getting the damned voices to shut up never mind giving them voices of their own.

Seriously I think it's just the mental image of my own voice that I have. Which is nothing like my actual voice if recording devices are to be trusted. Does anyone else feel the same way? When you hear your voice recorded it's nothing like the voice you hear when you speak? Weird, I know.

Murph, it has to do with you actually hearing your voice twice. The first is that it travels through your bone structure to your eardrum and the second is hearing the normal way. The two join together to make a different sound.

It makes me mad because I like the voice I hear a lot better than the one everyone else hears

Honestly, when I read there's no "voice" per se, associated with it... just words entering my brain. I kinda speed read I guess, so there's not much word by word reading unless the words are foreign or unfamiliar in some way.... but even then I don't know that there's an actual voice to it.

whats fun to do is read a book, then see the movie, then read the book again and see how much the character and scenes change in your head.

Ok I'm done (damn, Justin, you crack me up sometimes)

I hear different voices for each character.

If I had a choice, I'd have all my reading narrated by Samuel L Jackson (Has anyone else seen The Farce Of the Penguins?)

morgan freeman would be a good voice to hear

i think it'd sound somthing like watching shawshank redemption (one of if not my favorite movie)