The Voice in the Head

Some whole-language advocates believe that subvocalization – that is, hearing the words in your head as you read – hampers the reading process, at least as far as speed and efficiency are concerned. Says Janet Doman, director of the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential (and daughter of Glenn Doman):

[At school] we are literally trained to read and talk at the same time. And this is not a good way to teach, because when you and I go to read a book, we subvocalize. We actually are talking, and it means we read very, very slowly. [A baby] will just take in the word, and as you teach him to read and he gets to be a better and better reader, he’s not subvocalizing.

The Domans emphasize the ability of babies and young children to learn with the right hemisphere of the brain (which is dominant in children up to the age of three and a half). Children can rapidly and effortlessly absorb large amounts of information this way. However, as Sykes explains, we should not confuse the desired end with the means of achieving that end:

As many of his successors would do, [proto-educationist James] Cattell confused the “attributes” of readers (or in later edspeak, “the expected behaviors” or “outcomes”) with the appropriate way of acquiring those attributes. Of course, skilled readers did not stop to sound out words; long practice had made that unnecessary. It was thus an “outcome” of learning to read; the mechanics of reading, including the ability to sound out words, enabled the reader to achieve that outcome. But since the actual process of sounding out words is not the desired “outcome,” educationists decided that they could dispense with it.

Mark Seidenberg, psychology professor and coauthor of a 2004 study that used a computer model to mimic how children learn to read, agrees. “It’s very clear that in the early stages of beginning to read, the model – and child – learns more rapidly if the connections among spelling and sound and meaning are established,” he says.

Later, having learned homonyms such as “there” and “their,” the reader begins to rely more on sight recognition, which is faster than sounding out individual letters. But, explains Seidenberg, “You can’t go straight to that end point. Learning to read words visually is hard – it takes a lot of practice because the mapping between spelling and meaning is almost arbitrary… Sounding things out gradually strengthens the visual process until it becomes more efficient and does more of the work.”

So subvocalization has a role to play – for fluent readers as well as children learning to read. Both children and adults find it easier to comprehend the meaning of a word while hearing the familiar sound it makes. In other words, good readers simultaneously blend their knowledge of spellings and sounds during reading.

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Earlier is easier…