Abstract

We used Descriptive Experience Sampling to explore the pristine inner experience of 16 college students while reading Fitzgerald and Hemingway short stories. We provide rich descriptions of the phenomena while reading. Visual imagery was frequent. Although many theorists presume the ubiquitous presence of an inner voice that narrates the text as it is read, we found that only about 3% of samples involved such inner narration. Words were experienced during about a quarter of all samples, including: a focus on specific words from the text, words innerly spoken in response to the text, and innerly spoken unrelated words. We suggest that presuppositions account for others' overestimation of silent speech frequency, and discuss the impact of these findings on understanding reading and consciousness science.