Outer vs. Inner Reverberations: Verbal Auditory Imagery and Meaning-Making in Literary Narrative

Abstract

It is generally acknowledged that verbal auditory imagery, the reader's sense of hearing the words on a page, matters in the silent reading of poetry. Verbal auditory imagery (VAI) in the silent reading of narrative prose, on the other hand, is mostly neglected by literary and other theorists. This is a first attempt to provide a systematic theoretical account of the felt qualities and underlying cognitive mechanics of VAI, based on convergent evidence from the experimental cognitive sciences, psycholinguistic theory, and introspection. More generally, the aim is to isolate a new set of embodied experiences which, along with more widely researched phenomena such as sensorimotor enactment or emotion, contribute to our understanding of literary narrative. The central argument is that distinctions within the domain of embodied VAI also apply to higher-order meaning-making, i. e., that discrete types of VAI are associated with discrete tendencies in spontaneous literary interpretation. Spontaneous literary interpretation stands for any process of meaning-making, however inarticulate, that reaches the reader's consciousness in an uninterrupted course of reading.Although the necessity of phonological access for the silent processing of print is disputed, the experimental contexts in which VAI has proven to depend on lower-order embodied processes, and/or to have a pronounced effect on silent reading, are countless. But what is it like, in terms of embodiment, to consciously experience VAI? The basic felt quality of all VAI is that the linguistic medium of a written narrative enters the reader's awareness qua spoken discourse. This description of VAI, however apt, is not very elaborate. But as we begin to study narrative VAI experiences in greater detail, they soon fall into two distinct types, or more precisely, position themselves between two ends of a continuum. The two ends will be referred to as outer and inner reverberations.Outer reverberations put the reader in the position of a vicarious listener, feeding on activity in the mind's ear only. Meanwhile, inner reverberations reach DOI 10.1515DOI 10. /jlt-2013 JLT 2013; 7(1-2): 111-134 the mind's ear via subvocal rehearsal, i. e., covert articulatory activity in the reader's mouth and throat. While outer reverberations represent text as situated speech and may accommodate perceptual detail of the imaginary voice, inner reverberations rather tend to represent text as raw language, where the only auditory qualities to be explored are those of first-person (subvocal) speech production. Although outer reverberations can feature some kinesthetic qualities such as a sense of resonance in the reader's torso, kinesthetic experience is much more pronounced in inner reverberations, and felt motor activity in the articulatory apparatus is a distinctive trait of inner reverberations alone. Outer reverberations may effectively be prompted by textual cues such as oral style, speaker familiarity, and situational embedding. By contrast, inner reverberations may be more ...

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