The role of prosodic information in silent reading: An eye–tracking study
The role of prosodic information in silent reading: An eye–tracking study

Summary/Abstract: A century old intuition about the “inner voice” that accompanies silent reading is nowadays formulated as the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) emphasizing the role prosody plays in silent reading comprehension. To test the IPH, an eye–tracking corpus was set up and analysed. Th e corpus consisted of eye–tracking data collected in natural reading, i.e. on text materials not experimentally manipulated. Th e corpus included a short story that participants, unbalanced Croatian–English bilinguals, read in Croatian and English. Th e eye–tracking data corroborate the IPH, but only in English, while in Croatian the results are less clear. Th e participants’ gaze was more linked to the content words rather than the prosodic information, but only for fi xation durations, not their counts. Arguably, these results refl ect diff erences in stress and grammatical structures between Croatian and English.

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