Postby Linguaphile » 2022-09-09, 23:18
I'm going to have to answer with a vague "sort of". I "hear" words in my head when I read in more or less the same way I "hear" words when I think. There is a mental association with the sound in a way that is almost like hearing it, except that it's not as precise as, say, hearing someone actually read the text aloud. In my head it goes faster than speech normally is and there may be parts missing (for example, I may recognize the meaning of a long word before "hearing" the whole word in my head so then I mentally move on to the next word before I've "heard" the whole thing) or less important functional words skipped over and when that happens it doesn't "sound" weird, because it's not really the same as hearing speech in my head. I guess it's a bit like hearing my own internal mental language. It's kind of hard to describe, especially since it happens pretty subconsciously - if deliberately try to pay attention to what it sounds like, I'm pretty sure I'm also changing the way it sounds by doing so. All I can say for sure is that I mentally do associate the written words with their sounds, but not in exactly the same way as hearing them aloud.