Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 1977, Vol. 9 (4), 250-252

If you speak slowly, do people read your prose slowly? Person-particular speech recoding during reading

STEPHEN M. KOSSLYN and ANN M. C. MATT Johns Hopkins University, BaUimore, Maryland 21218

This paper demonstrates that knowledge of a writer's speaking speed sometimes affects how quickly people read his prose.

This paper investigates the possibility that readers may recode written material into a format analogous to that of the actual speech of the writer. In the present experiments, we explore whether knowledge of one characteristic of a writer's speech-his speech rate­affects how quickly one reads that writer's prose. These experiments do not constitute an exhaustive study, but rather serve to introduce and delineate a new phe­nomenon heretofore not investigated by psychologists.

EXPERIMENT 1

Method Materials. A tape recording was made of a short conver­

sation between two men, one of whom spoke very rapidly (at an average rate of 3.9 words/sec) and one of whom spoke quite slowly (1.6 words/'£c). The conversation was 2 min 17 sec long and was very colloquial in tone, being about week­end activities. The fast speaker uttered an average of 11.5 words (in 1.8 sentences) per remark and the slow speaker u'£d a mean of 9.7 words (in 1.3 '£ntences) per remark in each of 12 exchanges.

Two five-sentence "conversational" paragraphs were con­structed (83 words, or 109 syllables; 84 words, or 109 syllables), describing a fictitious restaurant and a country outing.

Procedure. Subjects rll'st simply listened to the conversation. subjects were told that "Harry, the rll'st person you heard on the tape, wrote it" and half were told that "Jim, the '£cond person you heard on the tape, wrote it." Author identity and order of pre'£ntation were counterbalanced over subjects. Speakers were always referred to by name or order of ap­pearance, never by speech rate. After the rll'st passage, subjects read aloud the other passage, purportedly written by the re­maining speaker. Reading times were recorded secretly (no subject realized he was timed).

After reading the paragraphs, the subject was asked if he had "heard" internally the writer's voice when reading.

Subjects. Twelve Johns Hopkins University students volun­teered to participate. No subject participated in more than one experiment reported herein, nor did any subject infer the pur­pose of the experiment in which he took part.

Results Subjects read more quickly the passage purportedly

written by the faster speaker (a mean of 30.8 sec vs

Requests for reprints and/or a more detailed report should be sent to Stephen M. Kosslyn, Department of Psychology, The Johns Hopkins University. This work was supported by NIMH Grant R03 MH 27012-01 and NSF Grant BNS 76-16987. Thanks to Howard Egeth.

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52.4 sec for the slow speaker, p < .05 by a sign test). Interestingly, seven of the nine people who showed the effect reported "hearing" the appropriate voice while reading, whereas two of the three remaining subjects reported not experiencing auditory imagery.

Discussion The subjects had no idea why they were listening to the tape

or reading the passage; perhaps reading rate was varied in an effort to amu'£ themselves in an otherwise boring task (although subjects denied this). The next experiment is a more preci'£ replication.

EXPERIMENT 2

This experiment was the same as the first in all re­spects but two: (I) Before hearing the tape, people were told to "listen carefully; we will ask you a few questions later about what the people are talking about." (2) After the tape, subjects were asked to read aloud a couple of passages before the memory test.

Method Materials and procedure. The materials and procedure were

identical to tho'£ of Experiment 1, except as noted above. After both passages were read, a very short and simple memory test was administered (to avoid seeming overly duplicitous).

Subjects. Twelve Johns Hopkins students volunteered to be subjects.

Results Every subject required less time to read the passage

supposedly written by the faster speaker (means of 20.6 sec vs 37.0 sec). Eight of the 12 subjects claimed to "hear" the writer's voice when reading; as in all of these experiments, no one reported conSCiously con­trolling their reading rate or suspecting the hypothesis.

When compared to the results of Experiment 1, the present subjects tended to read more quickly (28.8 vs 41.6 sec), but this result was not significant (t < 1).

Discussion It will help us to understand the pre'£nt findings if we can

discover under what circumstances the observed effects are obtained. "Person-particular recoding" may occur only when the initially heard material and later read material are similar in tone.

EXPERIMENT 3

This experiment was identical to Experiment 2, except that subjects read nonconversational passages.

Method Materials. The same tape used previously also was used here.

Two new passages were constructed, however. The first passage contained six sentences (83 words, or 121 syllables); the second was six sentences (83 words, or 123 syllables). The paragraphs described the same events as those of the first experiments, but tended to use lower frequency words and more stilted constructions (e.g., eight commas here vs three before).

Procedure. The procedure was identical to that of Experi­ment 2.

Subjects. Twelve Johns Hopkins students were volunteer subjects.

Results Again, every subject required more time to read aloud

a passage reputedly written by the faster speaker (means of 32.2 vs 46.2 sec). Eight of these people claimed to "hear" the writer's voice while reading. Reading times, in general, tended to be greater than in the last ex­periment (39.6 vs 29.5 sec), but not significantly so (t < I).

Reading rate baseline. Does "person-particular re­coding" speed up or slow down reading? Baselines were obtained from 12 new Johns Hopkins students, who simply read the passages aloud, and were surrep­titiously timed as they did so; presentation order was counterbalanced. None of these subjects realized they were being timed. Passages were read faster, on the average, than in the experimental condition (22.6 sec vs 39.6 sec); in fact, every subject in this group read faster than every subject in the experimental group. Further, the reading times were faster than times to read the fast-speaker's passages in the experiment proper; again there was no overlap in the distributions of times. Finally, there was no difference whatsoever in mean times required to read the two passages.

Discussion Clearly, it is not the tone of a passage that engenders person­

particular speech recoding during reading. This sort of special­ized encoding required time relative to when readers did not know the identity of the writer, even though the subjects in the experimental condition were presumably reading quickly to get to the memory test. In addition, in all of the experiments, reading rates of passages attributed to the fast speaker were considerably slower than his actual speech rate on the tape. Our subjects were not simply mimicking what they had heard.

EXPERIMENT 4

Kleiman (1975) reports that speech recoding during silent reading occurs primarily when subjects must grasp meaning. The same may adhere in the present case, or "person-particular recoding" could emerge only when "higher order" units (as occur in connected discourse) are read. If the sentences of a passage do not cohere, the additional work required to read may force reallocation

PERSON-PARTICULAR RECODING 251

of processing capacity, hindering person-particular recoding; the slower times of the experimental group of Experiment 3 relative to the baseline group suggests that person-particular recoding requires more processing than is necessary simply to read. Thus, in the following experiment we used scrambled versions of the conver­sational passages used in Experiment 2.

Method Materials. The same tape recording used previously was used

here. In addition, the sentences of the passages used in Experi­ment 2 were rearranged such that paragraphs made as little sense as possible.

Procedure. The procedure was identical to that of Experi­ment 2.

Subjects. Twelve Johns Hopkins students were volunteer subjects.

Results Only eight people read the fast-speaker's passage

faster than the slow speaker's (mean times of 20.6 vs 24 sec); this difference was not significant [t(22) = 1.49, P > 1]. Further, only three subjects reported "hearing" the writer's voice while reading. Finally, these scrambled passages required slightly less time to read than the coherent versions of Experiment 2 (mean of 22.3 vs 28.8 sec), but not significantly so (t < 1).

Discussion The mean reading times here are indistinguishable from the

reading rate baselines of Experiment 3 (22.3 vs 22.6 sec). Person­particular recoding may require much processing; if comprehen­sion is impaired, the level of processing where person-particular recoding takes place may not be reached. If so, then person­particular recoding ought to be inhibited whenever a reading task becomes relatively difficult.

EXPERIMENT 5

These subjects searched for targets as they read; if person-particular recoding is in fact an auditory process, as the imagery introspections might suggest, then search­ing for rhyming targets may disrupt this effect more than will searching for visual targets. The auditory task may selectively tap capacity otherwise used in person­particular recoding (cf. Brooks, 1967; Kosslyn, Holyoak, & Huffman, 1976; Segal & Fusella, 1970).

Method Materials. The same tape-recorded conversation was again

used. The passages of Experiment 2 were rewritten slightly: One passage was five sentences long (83 words, or 111 syllables) and contained 10 words that had one long "e" sound (auditory targets) and 11 words that had one letter with a part falling below the word (e.g., y, g, for visual targets). The second passage was five sentences long (84 words, 111 syllables), with 10 words containing long "i" sounds (e.g., I, my) and 10 words containing double letters (e.g., food, all). Different targets were used in the two paragraphs because the same subject either searched for an auditory cue in both passages or a visual cue in both passages, and practice effects could have obliterated any consequences of person-particular recoding.

Procedure. The procedure was like that of Experiment 2, except that half of the subjects circled words containing the

252 KOSSLYN AND MATT

visual targets and half circled words containing the auditory targets as they read aloud. We completely counterbalanced assigned author-identity and presentation order for both target­type conditions.

Subjects. Sixteen Johns Hopkins students were volunteer subjects.

Results Searching for targets of either sort eliminated person­

particular recoding (37.1 sec vs 35.6 sec for faster vs slower speaker, p> .1). Sixty-six percent of the targets were correctly located in the auditory condition, and 72% were correctly located in the visual condition; this difference was not significant (t < 1). Although auditory targets disrupted effects of writer identity slightly more than did visual targets, the trend was not significant [t(1 4) = 1.31, p> .1]. Also, although people read slightly faster when searching for visual cues (mean time 33.0 sec) than for auditory cues (mean time 38.8 sec), the difference was not significant (t < 1). The search task increased times (an average of 13.7 sec) relative to those of Experiment 3 [t(28) = 4.9, P < .001]. Thirteen of the 16 subjects reported not "hearing" a voice while reading.

Discussion Although an extra processing load inhibited person-particular

recoding during reading aloud, no fum evidence was found for modality-specific interference of person-particular recoding.

EXPERIMENT 6

Whereas reading aloud forces one to attend to every word and punctuation mark, we probably do not do this while reading silently. Thus, it is of interest to discover whether person-particular recoding occurs when people read rapidly to themselves.

Method Materials. Materials of Experiment 2 also were used here. Procedure. The procedure was identical to that of Experi­

ment 2, except that subjects read the passages silently. The subject was timed from the moment he began to read until he looked up at the end of the passage.

SUbjects. Twelve Johns Hopkins students were volunteer subjects.

Results There was no evidence of person-particular recoding

in the reading speeds (19.9 sec for fast-speaker passages vs 19.5 sec for slow-speaker passages, p > .1). Plus, only 3 of the 12 subjects reported ''hearing'' the writer's voice as they read. Mean reading times (mean 19.7 sec) were faster than in any of tlie previous experiments.

Discussion These results may be due to subjects' skimming through the

passages quickly, or may indicate that person-particular recoding occurs only when one sets up motor programs for reading aloud. Unfortunately, all of the possible ways of discouraging skimming seem problematic: If a subject is told he will be tested on the passages, for example, he may well linger over details.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

This paper serves to introduce a new phenomenon to experi­mental psychology, which we have dubbed "person-particular speech recoding." Although people read faster when they thought a fast-speaking person authored a passage, they did not simply mimic the author's speech: Their rates were always slower than those of the tape-recorded speaker. Person-particular recoding seems to involve more processing than is required simply to read aloud, as witnessed by the increased times relative to the base rates obtained in Experiment 3. Further, when reading is made more difficult, by scrambling the sentences in a passage or by superimposing a search task, the effect is elim­inated. We also found that person-particular recoding does not seem to occur with silent reading in this situation.

In experiments wherein writer identity affected reading rates, at least 75% of the subjects reported experiencing auditory images of the appropriate voice While reading; in contrast, in experiments where we did not fmd evidence of person­particular recoding, no more than 25% of the subjects reported "hearing" the voice. Whether this auditory imagery is functional is an open question; we found no substantive evidence of selec­tive interference effects in Experiment 4.

Not only do we not know whether imagery has a functional role in person-particular speech recoding, but we do not even know whether person-particular recoding is functional. Four possible effects of such recoding are: (I) it may engender deeper "levels of processing," and hence might enhance memory of the read material (cf. Craik & Lockhart, 1972). (2) It may result in better memory for identity of the author. (3) It may interfere more with other memories of that person than when person­particular recoding does not occur. (4) It may emphasize aspects of a passage particularly relevant for a given speaker. That is, person-particular recoding should involve more than merely speed; it also should incorporate stress patterns and the like. If a person is acutely sensitive to titles, and tends to stress them-or stutter over them- in his speech, for example, person­particular recoding of a passage might serve to enhance encoding of this material.

Providing we can demonstrate person-particular recoding has some functional significance, and hence is worth studying, it will be useful to understand when it occurs. In particular, it seems likely that under some circumstances person-particular recoding occurs during silent reading (in fact, the phenomenon was originally stumbled upon in the act of casually reading a note silently to oneself). It would also be interesting to dis­cover which attributes of speech (in addition to speed) are included in the recoding.

REFERENCES

BROOKS, L. The suppression of visualization by reading. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1967, 19, 289-299.

CRAIK, F. I. M., & LOCKHART, R. S. Levels of processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1972, 11,671-684.

KLEIMAN, G. M. Speech recoding in reading. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1975, 14,323-339.

KOSSLYN, S. M., HOLYOAK, K. J., & HUFFMAN, C. S. A processing approach to the dual coding hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 1976, 2, 223-233.

SEGAL, S. J., & FUSELLA, V. Influence of imaged pictures and sounds on detection of visual and auditory signals. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1970, 83,458-464.

(Received for publication November 11, 1976.)