Do any of you hear voices when you read ?

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Gbgeorgia1
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28 May 2018, 11:01 am

I've asked a lot of family this and seems they don't have this voice when they read of think, its like I can hear it out loud and find it distressful.
Is this part of autism. :|



Trogluddite
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28 May 2018, 11:04 am

It could be, if you're a particularly "word thinker". I find that I have to "hear" the words in my head for what I'm reading to really sink in; if I don't do that, I can go for pages scanning the text, then realise that I have no idea what I just read. Pretty much the same when I'm writing, too.


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MrMacPhisto
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28 May 2018, 11:07 am

Depends on the book and the author. If it is a book based on my favourite TV Show I can hear the characters voices and I end up reading it as if they are saying it. Same with authors when I have heard them speak. There voice is in my head when I am reading.



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28 May 2018, 3:37 pm

I read an article recently about hearing voices. It seems some writers hear what their characters are saying before they write it down. Charles Dickens was one of them.



rowan_nichol
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28 May 2018, 4:28 pm

I did when I first learned to read.
It was a great moment when instead of reading aloud quietly I read the words aloud in my head.
It is a long time since that was the case, I now seem to read purely visually, recognising the word and the shape of it without having to generate a sound cue in my head.

This series of talks by Ute Frith fascinated me. Her research teased out just how many different parts of the brain are involved in the process of reading.

The bit which showed just how important that stage turning words into speach in the mind is in reading was comparing rates of Dyslexia in English speaking places and Italian speaking places. English has crazy and sometime illogical relations between letters and sounds. italian on the other hand is totally regular in the writing of the sounds of the language.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ7cnqN ... dex=4&t=0s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMFIzjt ... dex=5&t=0s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8me0r8 ... dex=6&t=0s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWebAzG ... dex=7&t=0s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPbMrvA ... dex=8&t=0s



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28 May 2018, 4:54 pm

Depends on what you mean when you say "hear a voice".

We all have an inner voice in our head that narrates our thinking.

That voice in your head that just said "WTF is he talking about!? I don't hear no voice in my head!" .

That's the voice I mean. Just the sound of thinking.

But if you hear an actual intrusive "voice" , like an auditory hallucination, then that's something else.



neilson_wheels
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28 May 2018, 5:23 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
We all have an inner voice in our head that narrates our thinking.


This is not correct, some people are purely visual thinkers. Temple Grandin would be one of the most well known and has written about the subject.

For me I only have words in my head when reading, forming responses or recounting past discussions. All other thoughts are images and I have trouble translating those images into words.

I'm assessed as borderline autistic, diagnosed with severe ADHD and I think I'm Alexithymic, so I can't really speak about the correlation with Autism.



The_Gimp
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28 May 2018, 6:21 pm

Yes, always!
And it depends on the quality of the book too. Back in high school when I was reading Hamlet or The Scarlet Letter I'd hear Kelsey Grammer's voice as if he's reading it to me..If it's just a casual book like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy I get Ray Romano's voice and if its a garbage book oh Jesus probably just Jeff Goldblum or something, I don't know.



naturalplastic
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28 May 2018, 6:23 pm

Who knows?
I am very visual in my thinking, but I have the voice. Often its hard to translate a visual concept into words.

It figures that there could be a minority of folks who don't have that inner voice.

But my point was that "a" voice is pretty universal to have going on in your head when you read. Not an "autistic thing". I remember once as a kid reading a book about the history of ocean liner ships of the twentieth century. And there was a particular British luxury liner that served as a troop transport landing thousands of allied troops on embattled beaches in WWII. And the book authors managed to get Winston Churchill to write an essay praising the career of the particular ship("the Lady with a Fighting Heart")- and as soon I started to read his essay my nondescript voice automatically switched into Winston Churchill's voice (that I had heard making famous speeches on old newsreels on TV) speaking to me.



Kiriae
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29 May 2018, 2:09 pm

They probably do have the voice but its so natural for them they don't pay attention - it just "is".
The phenomenon is called subvocalization, appears as a side effect of the methods kids are taught to read (make words out of letters, not remember words as whole) and is a troublesome habit for those who want to learn speed reading (although even speedreaders subvocalize some words). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization

Unless someone was born deaf and learned to read before he could understand words he will subvocalize. At least in English and similliar languages.

I am mostly a visual thinker and while I do have the habit in Polish and English but I realized it doesn't happen so much with Japanese which I am learning now - it's easier for me to remember kanji meanings than it's pronunciation. Because there is no direct relationship between the picture and the sound it makes.

I can't see letters "mori" in 森 so there is nothing to vocalize, I mostly just I see a forest.
Image
Getting "mori" requires focus - recalling the sound of whole sentences containing 森, such as recent anime "Piano no mori".

I am not much better with English though. Polish and English letters pronunciation is slightly different and I learned English mostly by reading so my subvocalization of English isn't that strong. A lot of times I know exactly how to write a word and can see it with my minds eye but subvocalization can't read it clearly and I can't make the sound right.
In many cases I also need subtitles to understand speech thanks to my auditory processing disorder - in any language (Polish, English, Japanese) I might sometimes hear a word clearly, know it well and be able to repeat but will understand the meaning only after seeing how it's written. For example recently I heard "Teatr Ludowy"(Theatre of folks) as "Plac Budowy"(building site) and got confused. I still could hear nothing but "Plac Budowy" even when the person repeated it 3 times. I got it when I read it on a list of tram stops. But when we got to the stop the tram still said "Teatr budowy" to my ears even though I knew it was supposed to be "Ludowy". All because "Ludowy" isn't a word I hear often because it's a little outdated and "budowy" is a common word.



Dataunit
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29 May 2018, 2:44 pm

Yes, I do. I hadn't realised that not everyone did.


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