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BrienneYudkowsky comments on Meditation Trains Metacognition - Less Wrong
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Interesting! You're the first person I've heard of who never used inner speech while reading in the first place. I know people who believe they've learned to stop, but there's also evidence that their vocal chords continue moving when they read just like everyone else's so something fishy is going on. On the other hand, I really doubt Eliezer's vocal chords are doing that, because he reads at least three times more quickly than I could possibly speak no matter how many times I'd rehearsed the words, yet he does claim to hear a little voice in his head as he reads. (How he parses it I have no idea. It's frightening how quickly his mind can move.) I was about to say, "I wish we could know by third-person science rather than mere reporting on phenomenology whether vocal chord movement reliably tracks inner speech," but if we could do that then vocal chord movement wouldn't matter since what I'm really interested is knowing whether inner speech is happening.
Edit: Not the study I had in mind, but evidence that subvocalization can be detected via electrical signals sent to vocal muscles. http://www2.hawaii.edu/~binsted/papers/BinstedJorgensenHICSS2006.pdf
I bet most people read much faster than they could possibly speak, and most of them subvocalize. One possible reason is they skip all the filler that doesn't help comprehension. I don't think I subvocalize whole words, and I skip many. Then there's skimming which is a completely different matter.
Or maybe I don't notice it somehow.
I naturally (without learning to speed-read) read non-taxing fiction at slightly over a page a minute, which is not very fast, but still faster than I could possibly subvocalize it. I thought this rate is pretty average, but maybe others can subvocalize faster. I do notice that I subvocalize when writing or when formulating my thoughts into words for further expression, just not when reading or listening.
Yes, this is exactly why I want to be able to directly test for inner speech without having to go through the vocal muscles.
.... There's something that's confusing me here. I notice that I am confused and am pointing this out to remind me to get back to it.
It's to do with the fact that, while whenever I consciously read I subvocalize, when I really get entranced by a book my subjective experience looks more like watching a movie, and I hear things only when people speak them.
It's also to do with the fact that I'm not sure what reading without subvocalization would look like; no matter how you take in an input string you're going to have a temporary variable with bits of the string lying around somewhere.