Speech Processing During Reading

Even for Huey (1908), whose insights into reading still guide modern research, confusion surrounded the role played by speech processing during reading. While he claimed, “There can be little doubt that the main meaning comes to consciousness only with the beginning of the sentence utterance, and the reader does not feel he has the complete sense until he has spoken it” (p. 147), he also admitted that “Purely visual reading is quite possible, theoretically” (p. 117). Why do we so frequently find ourselves subvocalizing while we read, if we can read in a purely visual manner? The focus of this paper will be on the function served by speech processing while reading, and on where in information processing models such speech recoding mechanisms should be located.