Empirical Investigations of the Role of Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing

Recently, psycholinguistics has seen an increase in the number of empirical studies investigating the role of implicit (silent) prosodic representations in reading. The current paper reviews studies from the last several years conducted to investigate Fodor’s (2002) Implicit Prosody Hypothesis, which maintains that even during silent reading, readers generate representations of sentence intonation, phrasing, stress, and rhythm, and that these representations can affect readers’ interpretation of the text. We argue that the accumulated evidence suggests that implicit prosody can influence online sentence interpretation and explore the implications of these findings for models of sentence processing. For over one hundred years, researchers have wondered about the nature of the inner voice during silent reading. Huey (1908/1968) was one of the first to ponder this idea, concluding: ‘The simple fact is that the inner saying or hearing of what is read seems to be the core of ordinary reading, the “thing in itself,” so far as there is such a part of such a complex process’ (p. 122). This assumption, that the inner voice is part and parcel of any normal reading, has been maintained for the majority of the 20th century. Chafe (1988) recounts the writings of Eudora Welty and Russell C. Long on the topic, concluding: ‘I am not alone in believing that writers when they write, and readers when they read, experience auditory imagery of specific intonations, accents, pauses, rhythms, and voice qualities, even if the writing itself may show these features poorly, if at all. This “covert prosody” of written language is evidently something that is quite apparent to a reflective writer or reader’ (p. 397). An increasing interest in spoken language over the last 25years has inspired psycholinguistic researchers to begin to critically consider the role of the inner voice during reading. One of the main questions concerning researchers is whether the inner voice serves a purpose during reading. Is the producing, or hearing, of words and phrases during reading simply epiphenomenal—a by-product of the fact that language has been spoken far longer than it has been written (Gelb 1952), or does it enhance the reader’s processing and understanding of the written word? The goal of the current paper is to review recent psycholinguistic investigations of silent reading to begin to answer this question. Studies of phonology’s role in reading have focused on two types of phonological representation: segmental phonology and suprasegmental phonology. Segmental phonology concerns the individual phonemes which make up words, whereas suprasegmental phonology deals with sound phenonema above the level of the word; that is, acoustic information that does not serve to distinguish one word from another, but rather conveys information about the semantic context of the word, or the attitude of the speaker. For example, the segmental features of the word ‘fire’ include the phonemes /f/ /aI/ and /r/, whereas suprasegmental features determine whether the word is produced as a statement (‘Fire.’), a question (‘Fire? ’),