Just a quick response to Michael Vassar: I am a very fast reader--just about the fastest I know. And I very much doubt that I could, at my advanced age, learn to read without hearing. Anyway, why would I want to? Among other things, I suspect that those who don't hear the words they read don't enjoy poetry as much as I do. What interests me about all this is that it seems to me to show that people's mental processes differ a lot more than we usually think--a topic that psychology doesn't seem to have paid a lot of attention to, and if the psychologists don't look into it, who will? (I don't know much about psychology, though; maybe my last point is wrong--hope so.)