Do you hear the words in your head when you read?

[Mars80]

I always hear the words in my head when I'm not reading out loud. I have read that some people read without hearing the words in their heads and it is clearly possible or else people born deaf wouldn't be able to read, but I just cannot imagine reading this way.

[md0]

Occasionally, but not usually. I think I do hear them when I'm very tired.

[Linguaphile]

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.

[Karavinka]

Depending on the language and depending on how carefully I want to read.

If I were to read an important contract I'd be carefully reading one word at a time and I'd hear it in my brain (called "subvocalization") regardless of the language. But if it's a quick SNS message or a simple novel, or when I'm skimming through a long text, I usually don't in Korean or English. I'd be a little more likely to subvocalize when reading Japanese, French or German; with Polish or Thai, I do almost every word.