Those voices in your head: Activation of auditory images during reading

摘要

Auditory imagery experiences (AlEs) occur when readers simulate character voices whilereading. This project assessed how familiarity with voice and narrative contexts influencesactivation of AlEs. Participants listened to dialogs between two characters. Participants thenread scripts with the characters, half that had been previously listened to and half that werenew. During reading, participants were interrupted with an auditory recognition task, withprobes presented in voices that either matched or mismatched the character associatedwith the current line of dialog. Faster responses to matching than mismatching voices wereconsistently obtained for familiar scripts, providing evidence for AlEs. Transfer to unfamiliarscripts only occurred after extended experience with character voices. These findings definefactors that influence activation of speaker voice during reading, with implications forunderstanding the nature of linguistic representations across presentation modalities.