We've all heard or seen the discussion about aphantasia and folks who lack an internal monologue — and no matter which side of the divide you're on, it's shocking to find out the other exists. "Wait, people can just picture things in their heads?" "What, there are people who don't continuously hear their own voice in a running commentary?"
I was just listening to a podcast that mentioned the use, in comics, of bolding certain words in text for emphasis, and one of the hosts said that she was learning to enjoy it, because it helped establish the speech rhythms when she was subvocalizing the dialogue. The other host wasn't familiar with the word, and when the first explained that many people read by hearing each word in their heads, she was amazed, because she didn't realize there were people who read in any other way. And all the time, I'm on exactly the opposite end of this — there are people who do that all the time?
I knew the word "subvocalize", of course, but in the context that you could "think out loud", as it were, and not actually form the words, and there are computer systems that can recognize this and turn it into inputs. (The idea goes back in science fiction farther than we've had real machines to do that.) And I'd remarked on discussions of people talking about how they "hear" books in narrator or character voices, and how I didn't unless I made a particular effort; I do have an internal monologue, and I can picture objects in my head and manipulate them there, but I just don't have that (mental) audio experience. But it had honestly never occurred to me that other people did all their reading at an aural pace.
I learned to read very young, and I've always sort of attributed my high reading speed to a combination of practice and an adaptation to my borderline dyslexia — if letters are going to turn backwards on you, you learn to recognize whole words at a glance instead — and consequently been unable to describe just what "trick" it is that lets me read a thick novel in an afternoon. I've always had to deliberately slow down to "hear" the words, to consider meter and rhythms in poetry or drama — and now I get told that it really is that everybody else never stopped reading out loud?
