The role of prosodic information in silent reading: An eye–tracking study

Abstract

A century old intuition about the “inner voice” that accompanies silent reading is nowadays formulated as the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) emphasizing the role prosody plays in silent reading comprehension. To test the IPH, an eye–tracking corpus was set up and analysed. The corpus consisted of eye–tracking data collected in natural reading, i.e. on text materials not experimentally manipulated. The corpus included a short story that participants, unbalanced Croatian–English bilinguals, read in Croatian and English. The eye–tracking data corroborate the IPH, but only in English, while in Croatian the results are less clear. The participants’ gaze was more linked to the content words rather than the prosodic information, but only for fixation durations, not their counts. Arguably, these results reflect differences in stress and grammatical structures between Croatian and English.