![]() For example, when reading verbs describing simple physical actions, readers show increased brain activity in the areas of the motor cortex responsible for controlling those movements ( Hauk, Johnsrude, & Pulvermuller, 2004). Recent work in the domain of embodied cognition, also known as perceptual simulation ( Barsalou, 1999), has provided reasons to speculate that readers may simulate much more detailed representations than those specifically required for parsing, based on the findings that readers mentally simulate physical actions described in a text. However, this hypothesis does not address how detailed the default prosody that readers automatically generate is with respect to portions of a text that are not critical choice points in the ongoing parse. In terms of sentence-level prosody, Fodor (2002) proposed the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis, which states that readers generate a default form of prosody that plays a key role in parsing sentence structure, especially for resolving syntactic ambiguities. ![]() For example, words with more stressed syllables, which take longer to say aloud than words with fewer stressed syllables, receive longer gaze durations ( Ashby & Clifton, 2005). It has been shown that at the word level, some phonetic aspects of the speech signal are represented during reading. The amount of perceptual detail represented during silent reading has recently been the focus of considerable research. The current study seeks to address one aspect of inner speech, particularly whether the ‘speed’ of inner speech can be affected by the content of a narrative currently being read, and whether the effect is reflected in the speed of eye movements during silent reading. However, studying the form of the inner voice experimentally has proven difficult. Dating back to Huey (1908), psychology researchers have considered this inner speech to play an important role in reading comprehension ( Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989). When reading a story, readers often have the phenomenological experience of hearing the voices of the characters in their heads. Our findings add to the literature on perceptual simulation by showing that these effects can be instantiated with only a single adverb, and are strong enough to override effects of global sentence speed. Furthermore, fast adverbs were themselves read significantly faster than slow adverbs, an effect we attribute to implicit effects on the eye movement program stemming from automatically activated semantic features of the adverbs. ![]() The speed of the character’s movement did not affect direct quote reading times. , John…said energetically that he finally found his car keys). Results showed that readers spent less time reading direct quotes described as being said quickly compared to slowly (e.g., John walked/bolted into the room and said energetically/nonchalantly, “I finally found my car keys”), an effect that was not present when a nearly identical phrase was presented as an indirect quote (e.g. ![]() The current study manipulated the speed of a physical action performed by the speaker independently from character talking rate to determine if these sources have separable effects on perceptual simulation of a direct quote. ![]() Yao and Scheepers (2011) previously found that readers were faster to read direct quotes when the preceding context implied that the talker generally spoke quickly, an effect attributed to perceptual simulation of talker speed. The current study investigates whether the semantic content of a dialogue description can affect reading times on an embedded quote to determine if the speed at which a character is described as saying a quote influences how quickly it is read. ![]()
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