• Current
• Archives
• Log In
• Register
• Announcements
• About JLT Articles
• For Authors

Home > Vol 7, No 1-2 (2013) > Kuzmičová

Anežka Kuzmičová

Outer vs. Inner Reverberations: Verbal Auditory Imagery and Meaning-Making in Literary Narrative

(Abstract)

Full-length article in: JLT 7/1-2 (2013), 111–134.

It is generally acknowledged that verbal auditory imagery, the reader’s sense of hearing the words on a page, matters in the silent reading of poetry. Verbal auditory imagery (VAI) in the silent reading of narrative prose, on the other hand, is mostly neglected by literary and other theorists. This is a first attempt to provide a systematic theoretical account of the felt qualities and underlying cognitive mechanics of VAI, based on convergent evidence from the experimental cognitive sciences, psycholinguistic theory, and introspection. More generally, the aim is to isolate a new set of embodied experiences which, along with more widely researched phenomena such as sensorimotor enactment or emotion, contribute to our understanding of literary narrative. The central argument is that distinctions within the domain of embodied VAI also apply to higher-order meaning-making, i. e., that discrete types of VAI are associated with discrete tendencies in spontaneous literary interpretation. Spontaneous literary interpretation stands for any process of meaning-making, however inarticulate, that reaches the reader’s consciousness in an uninterrupted course of reading.

Although the necessity of phonological access for the silent processing of print is disputed, the experimental contexts in which VAI has proven to depend on lower-order embodied processes, and/or to have a pronounced effect on silent reading, are countless. But what is it like, in terms of embodiment, to consciously experience VAI? The basic felt quality of all VAI is that the linguistic medium of a written narrative enters the reader’s awareness qua spoken discourse. This description of VAI, however apt, is not very elaborate. But as we begin to study narrative VAI experiences in greater detail, they soon fall into two distinct types, or more precisely, position themselves between two ends of a continuum. The two ends will be referred to as outer and inner reverberations.

Outer reverberations put the reader in the position of a vicarious listener, feeding on activity in the mind’s ear only. Meanwhile, inner reverberations reach the mind’s ear via subvocal rehearsal, i. e., covert articulatory activity in the reader’s mouth and throat. While outer reverberations represent text as situated speech and may accommodate perceptual detail of the imaginary voice, inner reverberations rather tend to represent text as raw language, where the only auditory qualities to be explored are those of first-person (subvocal) speech production. Although outer reverberations can feature some kinesthetic qualities such as a sense of resonance in the reader’s torso, kinesthetic experience is much more pronounced in inner reverberations, and felt motor activity in the articulatory apparatus is a distinctive trait of inner reverberations alone.

Outer reverberations may effectively be prompted by textual cues such as oral style, speaker familiarity, and situational embedding. By contrast, inner reverberations may be more likely to occur with discourse particularly lacking in such cues. However, the cuing process is subject to many variables pertaining to the text, the individual reader, and the specific reading session. More generally, then, inner reverberations can be said to result from the language of an utterance appearing markedly non-situated. As a consequence, inner reverberations entail a sense of medium opacity, while outer reverberations may rather be associated with a relative sense of medium transparency.

On the level of higher-order meaning-making, outer and inner reverberations link with the presence or absence of spontaneous interpretation, respectively. This is due to a trade-off between one’s degree of openness to interpretation on the one hand and one’s bodily appropriation of the discourse on the other. The more one is engaged in what X could mean, the less one can possibly be engaged in the saying of X, and vice versa. In analogy to ordinary overt speech: When the voice is mine, the thought is mine as well. It is only when the voice is not mine that one is left to wonder what the underlying thought and meaning is. Other speakers are always ambiguous to some extent, requiring some interpretation. Meanwhile, as the firsthand speaker, one is unambiguous to oneself. Although one may be surprised at the specific course one’s speech has taken, one does not reflect, on equal terms with one’s interlocutors, on the many coexistent meanings of one’s utterance.

Consequently, meaning may be experienced as more dynamic and less firmly tied to wording in outer compared to inner reverberations. The particular words experienced in an outer reverberation are quicker in receding outside awareness, possibly due to the load of concurrent meaning-making. Because of the experiential intensity of such meaning-making relative to the baseline, »literal« meaning-making associated with inner reverberations, the words chosen may seem comparably arbitrary. In inner reverberations, on the other hand, this impression of comparable arbitrariness is less likely. Meaning is felt to be constricted, as it were, to wording proper.

The observations made in this essay are consistent with empirical findings in various fields of psychological inquiry, ranging from reader response and memory studies to experiments investigating willed VAI. For instance, it has been reported that imagined verbal stimuli are more ambiguous when the imaginary voice belongs to an extraneous speaker (in analogy to the proposed notion of outer reverberations), compared to when imagined as voiced by oneself (in analogy to the proposed notion of inner reverberations). In other words, there is experimental evidence that language heard in the mind’s ear can be more firmly or more loosely tied to meaning, depending on the imaginer’s level of self-implication in its production.

References

Abramson, Marianne/Stephen D. Goldinger, What the Readerʼs Eye Tells the Mindʼs Ear: Silent Reading Activates Inner Speech, Perception & Psychophysics 59:7 (1997), 1059–1068.

Aczel, Richard, Hearing Voices in Narrative Texts, New Literary History 29:3 (1998), 467–500.

Baddeley, Alan D./Vivien Lewis, Inner Active Processes in Reading: The Inner Voice, The Inner Ear, and the Inner Eye, in: Alan M. Lesgold/Charles A. Perfetti (eds.), Interactive Processes in Reading, Hillsdale 1981, 107–129.

Baddeley, Alan D./Robert Logie, Auditory Imagery and Working Memory, in: Daniel Reisberg (ed.), Auditory Imagery, Hillsdale 1992, 179–197.

Beggs, W.D.A.,/Philippa N. Howarth, Inner Speech as a Learned Skill, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 39:2 (1985), 396–411.

Caracciolo, Marco, Fictional Consciousnesses: A Reader’s Manual, Style 46:1 (2012), 42–61.

Chambers, Deborah/Daniel Reisberg, Can Mental Images Be Ambiguous?, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 11:3 (1985), 317–328.

Chapman, Raymond, The Treatment of Sound in Language and Literature, Oxford 1984.

Claassen, Eefje, Author Representations in Literary Reading, Amsterdam 2012.

Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, transl. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore 1974.

Fialho, Olivia/Sonia Zyngier/David Miall, Interpretation and Experience: Two Pedagogical Interventions Observed, English in Education 45:3 (2011), 236–253.

Havel, Václav, The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, in: V.H., The Garden Party and Other Plays, transl. Vera Blackwell, New York 1993, 131–182.

Hemingway, Ernest, The Garden of Eden, New York 1995.

Hubbard, Timothy A., Auditory Imagery: Empirical Findings, Psychological Bulletin 136:2 (2010), 302–328.

Ihde, Don, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, Albany 2007.

Ingarden, Roman, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, transl. Ruth Ann Crowley/Kenneth Olsen, Evanston 1973.

Jack, Anthony I./Andreas Roepstorff, Why Trust the Subject?, Journal of Consciousness Studies 10:9/10 (2003), v–xx.

Kotovych, Maria/Peter Dixon/Marisa Bortolussi/Mark Holden, Textual Determinants of a Component of Literary Identification, Scientific Study of Literature 1:2 (2011), 260–291.

Kurby, Christopher A./Joseph P. Magliano/David N. Rapp, Those Voices in Your Head: Activation of Auditory Images During Reading, Cognition 112:3 (2009), 457–461.

Kuzmičová, Anežka, Presence in the Reading of Literary Narrative: A Case for Motor Enactment, Semiotica 189:1/4 (2012), 23–48.

Lubbock, Percy, The Craft of Fiction, London 1921.

Miall, David S., Literary Reading: Empirical & Theoretical Studies, New York 2006.

–, Emotions and the Structuring of Narrative Responses, Poetics Today 32:2 (2011), 324–348.

Van Orden, Guy C./Bruce F. Pennington/Gregory O. Stone, Word Identification in Reading and the Promise of Subsymbolic Psycholinguistics, Psychological Review 97:4 (1990), 488–522.

Reisberg, Daniel/J. David Smith/David A. Baxter/Marcia Sonenshine, »Enacted« Auditory Images Are Ambiguous; »Pure« Auditory Images Are Not, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A: Human Experimental Psychology 41:3 (1989), 619–641.

Robinson, Marilynne, Housekeeping, London 1981.

Rosenblatt, Louise M., The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work, Carbondale 1994.

Rubery, Matthew, Introduction: Talking Books, in: M.R. (ed.), Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies, New York 2011, 1–21.

Sadoski, Mark/Allan Paivio, Imagery and Text, Mahwah 2001.

Scarinzi, Alfonsina, Evoking Interest, Evoking Meaning: The Literary Theme and the Cognitive Function of Stylistic Devices, in: Greg Watson (ed.), The State of Stylistics, Amsterdam 2008, 137–153.

Seilman, Uffe/Steen F. Larsen, Personal Resonance to Literature: A Study of Remindings While Reading, Poetics 18:1/2 (1989), 165–177.

Shapiro, Lawrence, Embodied Cognition, New York 2011.

Smith, J. David/Margaret Wilson/Daniel Reisberg, The Role of Subvocalization in Auditory Imagery, Neuropsychologia 33:11 (1995), 1433–1454.

Stewart, Garrett, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext, Berkeley 1990.

Tsur, Reuven, What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive? The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception, Durham 1992.

–, Rhyme and Cognitive Poetics, Poetics Today 17:1 (1996), 55–87.

Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich, Thinking and Speech, in: The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky, Vol. 1: Problems of General Psychology, ed. Robert W. Rieber/Aaron S. Carton, transl. Norris Minick, New York 1987, 37–283.

Yao, Bo/Pascal Belin/Christoph Scheepers, Silent Reading of Direct Versus Indirect Speech Activates Voice-selective Areas in the Auditory Cortex, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23:10 (2011), 3146–3152.

2014-02-20

JLTonline ISSN 1862-8990

Copyright© by the author. All rights reserved.
This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and JLTonline.
For other permission, please contact JLTonline.

Copyright © 2007 – present JLTonline

Contact Webmaster