278 / 2018-06-19 05:31:20

A Psycholinguistic Study on Inner Speech and ESL Reading Proficiency

inner speech, working memory, ESL reading proficiency, inhibitory control

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Inner speech, a core feature of human experience, refers to the talk or conversation the soul has with itself (Socrates, cited in Plato, 1987;Frawley, 1997), has been studied for over a century primarily in psychology and language acquisition field. In psychology, Vygotsky considered inner speech as "a distinct plane of verbal forms of thinking" (Vygotsky, 1986, p.148). He believed nonverbal thinking did exist but did not equal to "thinking with speaking in silence" (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 225). Huey (1908) pioneered in theorizing inner speech in reading context and argued that inner speech is a mandatory component in silent reading. Rayner, Pollatsek, Ashby, and Clifton (2012) termed inner speech as subvocolization, which implies that sometimes readers did not realize they had inner speech. In language acquisition and neuropsychology area, inner speech has been found to have close relationship with language processing. For example, Baddeley and Lewis (1981) found that inner speech plays an important facilitating role in processing complicated written text. Many previous studies in language acquisition and neurology field have focused on the activation of speech-related brain regions during silent reading (Alderson-Day, et al., 2016; Gizewski, Timmann, & Forsting, 2004; Kell, et al, 2016; Kühn, et al., 2013; Marvel and Desmond, 2012; Yao, Bo, Pascal, & Scheepers, 2012).
Inner speech has been considered as an important reading construct (Beggs&Howarth,1985; Carver,1990;Hardyck&petrinovich,1970;Huey,1908;Kato, 2009; Secor,1899; Yaden, 1984), because it often is caused by reading and also can improve reading rate when reading in one's first language [L1] (Carver, 1990). In an archival study conducted by Vihauer (2016), the researcher analyzed 160 posts regarding inner speech during silent reading using qualitative approach content analysis and found that 85% of the responding posts indicated that inner speech was often experienced during the respondents' silent reading.
Till this day, most of the silent reading related inner speech studies have been conducted in L1 context (de Guerrero, 2005); very limited research has been conducted in second language (L2) context. Existing studies assumed inner speech equals to reading words out loud in one's mind. Therefore, by asking participants to keep uttering an irrelevant word or text, inner speech can be suppressed (Sokolov, 1972; Kato, 2009). However, three major issues can be found in these assumptions. First, reading out loud in one's mind is not the only representation of inner speech. According to Vygotsky (2012), inner speech could occur in different situations, such as serving as an inner voice to guiding action, to read things out loud in one's mind, or to being an irrelevant sound. Second, both Sokolov (1972) and Kato (2009) claimed that reading rate was the fastest during silent reading condition (a condition when inner speech was not suppressed), however, research has suggested that working memory can also influence reading rate. People with good working memories are often times efficient readers (Alptekin & Eςetin, 2009). Thus, when considering the factors which could influence reading rate, besides language proficiency, age (which have been controlled in those studies) and inner speech suppression, working memory should also be included. Finally, when the participants were asked to utter irreverent words or text while reading in their second language, they had to inhibit the irrelevant information in order to process the English text they were reading. In this process, their inhibitory control ability should also be considered as part of the contribution to their reading proficiency, yet it was not investigated in the literature.
Given the issues identified above, this study sets out to investigate the impact of inner speech in terms of its existence, language type(s), and content type(s) on college ESL reading proficiency during sentence processing under three different conditions (silent reading, tapping, and articulation suppression) by administering an inner speech questionnaire after each condition. In addition, we will also investigate the relationship among working memory, inhibitory control ability, and reading proficiency. The significance of this study is threefold. First, it explores the possibilities of inner speech under tapping and articulation suppression conditions, under which inner speech has been assumed as non-existent by previous study (Sokolov,1972; Kato, 2009). Second, studying the inner speech content can inform us the function of inner speech and its impact on reading proficiency. Finally, the study contributes to our understanding of the dynamic relationship among inner speech, L1 influence, working memory, inhibitory control, and L2 proficiency.