Researchers describe how Inner Reading Voice reads out sentences to most people

What happens when you read? Do you hear a voice in your head speaking out the words to you as you comprehend their meaning while immersing yourself in a good book or article online?

Chances are you probably do experience as if you were literally being read by some miniature being inside your brain. That voice, now has a name. The "inner reading voice" or the IRV.

Your IRV would be different than mine. As they say, reading is a deeply personal act of consuming information, the one that requires some active focus unlike the sometime passive nature of consuming information by watching the content.

Two of the most significant studies on the subject have shown that 82.5 per cent of people do hear a voice when they read. These IRVs almost always "have the auditory qualities of overt speech, such as recognisable identity, gender, pitch, loudness and emotional tone."

These studies were conducted by New York University Professor of Psychology Ruvanee Vilhauer.

Vilhauer found that only nearly half of Inner Reading Voice owners hear one type of voice, typically their own.

But some people claimed to have multiple narrators inside their head. For instance, while reading dialogues, imagined voices of different characters sound different as a matter of distinction between the voices.

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Another study has suggested that people typically hear an internal voice that shares their own accent when reading. Shakespeare's sonnets read by Indian readers in India sound Indian, accent-wise. Similarly, a Salman Rushdie literary creation would sound western in the West, again, accent-wise.

For example, poems may or may not rhyme depending on how a person pronounces certain vowels, and silent reading can therefore influence the delivery of these art forms.

(with inputs from agencies)