ABSTRACT
When we read silently, we often experience the feeling of hearing our voice saying the words our eyes are falling on. Some readers actually move their lips at times during silent reading and there is a considerable amount of muscle activity in the speech tract as we read silently. What is the function of these activities? In the chapter on word perception we argued that access to the lexicon can proceed via a visual route or a phonological route and that phonological access of a word is not obligatory. Yet most of the time we can clearly hear our voice saying the words in the text and for most readers there is evidence of much activity. In this chapter, we will discuss these speech-related activities in terms of the possible reasons for their occurrence.
