People weren't always able to read silently. Writing began as a way to encode speech, not thought. In the early days, written text was performed for an audience, rather than consumed silently and alone.
Religious scripture, royal proclamations, the sagas of legendary heroes – these were written down to keep them accurate, but then read out loud to a crowd. Most people couldn’t read at all, and written documents were expensive and slow to produce, so reading in private didn’t make sense.
Early writing also copied the way we talk, without gaps between words or any of the other layout cues that we’re used to now, such as paragraphs, capital letters and punctuation.
Complex speech probably evolved at least 200,000 years before writing. The earliest writing we know of is cuneiform from about 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. So, it’s natural that our brain would reuse a lot of the same machinery to handle this newer form of language.
In the 1970s, psychologists Drs Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch proposed a model of our short-term memory whereby speech is buffered for a couple of seconds in something called the ‘phonological loop’. When you’re listening, the phonological loop holds the sounds long enough for you to decode them into words and then convert that to meaning.
And this happens when you read, too. Studies have shown that the muscles of your mouth, tongue and larynx are still activated, even when you read silently, a process called ‘subvocalisation’. This implies that we’re essentially still sounding out the words in our heads in order to decode them.
The real value of silent reading didn’t emerge until the advent of mass literacy and the printing press in the early Renaissance, but the skill is older than that. In 428 BCE, the playwright Euripides had Theseus silently read a letter held by his dead wife. And Roman leader Julius Caesar is reported to have silently read a love letter during a debate in the senate.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Kelly Peña, email) 'Why did it take people so long to learn to read silently?'
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