Reading
Do silent readers 'hear' stress and rhythm in their heads?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Readers slowed down on an ambiguous word when the story context demanded stressing it but the rhythm of the sentence made stress awkward, suggesting we build an inner prosody while reading silently.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — 2 (context: subject vs object focus) x 2 (left rhythm: on vs off beat) x 2 (right rhythm: stress clash or not) sentence manipulation; Experiment 1 unprepared oral reading, Experiment 2 eye-tracking during silent reading.
- N
- N=49 · Experiment 2 (eye tracking) analysed 49 native German speakers after three were excluded for mis-calibration; the participant count and methods of Experiment 1 are missing from the available text (only its results survive).
- Population
- Native German-speaking adults from the Berlin area (Experiment 2), who took part for course credit or payment.
- Outcome
- Experiment 1: whether the particle 'auch' was accented aloud; Experiment 2: first-pass, regression-path and total reading times on critical words.
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Key findings
Aloud, readers accented 'auch' much more often when context required it (41% vs 8% of cases) and more often when it fell on the beat (28% vs 20%), though overall they mostly left it unaccented. In silent reading, first-pass times on 'auch' were longer when context required the subject-focus reading, and longer reading times appeared when the needed accent clashed with the rhythmic position. This context-by-rhythm interaction appeared before readers had even fixated the disambiguating object, pointing to an early guiding role for implicit rhythm rather than later reanalysis. The manipulation of the following word's stress had only weak, late effects.
Methodology
The researchers built German sentences containing 'auch' ('too'), which can attach either to the subject or the object. A preceding context sentence decided which reading was correct (making the object old or new), and the syllable pattern of the preceding subject put 'auch' either on or off the rhythmic beat; the stress pattern of the following word was also varied. In Experiment 1 people read the sentences aloud unprepared and judges scored whether 'auch' was accented; in Experiment 2 a separate group read them silently while their eye movements were tracked.
Limitations
The available text is incomplete: the introduction and the methods and participant numbers of Experiment 1 are missing, so the oral-reading study cannot be fully evaluated here. Evidence is from one language (German) and one particle, with 24 item sets, so generalisation to other structures and languages is untested. Implicit prosody is inferred from reading times rather than measured directly, and the early effect on 'auch' is attributed to preview of the next word, which is an interpretation. Maximal random-effects models did not converge in the conventional analysis, though a Bayesian check largely agreed.
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