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Welcome to the limerick1 wiki!

The Limerick1 project was an eye-tracking study completed at Swarthmore College, PA during the 2018-2019 academic year as a senior thesis project. It was designed to explore whether the inner speech of silent reading occupies the same resources in working memory as other mental tasks.

How inner speech and silent reading intersect has been a topic of interest in cognitive psychology for over a century. At least since Huey’s (1908/1968) assertion that “it is perfectly certain that the inner hearing or pronunciation, or both, of what is read, is a constituent part of reading by far the most of people,” researchers have tried to discern the nature of the inner voice experienced during silent reading. It is well-established that some form of inner speech is experienced during many cognitive tasks like counting and decision-making due to their use of the phonological loop in working memory, but it is still unknown how or whether the inner speech experienced during such cognitive tasks is related to the inner speech that is experienced during silent reading.

In the first part of the experiment, participants read stress-alternating homographs (e.g., PREsent, preSENT) embedded in limericks, which compelled them to initially expect the incorrect prosody of the homograph and thus encounter a reading cost. As they read, participants also performed articulatory suppression by repeating the word this aloud. The goal of this was to use the outer voice to occupy the relevant resources in working memory, thus rendering them unavailable to be used during silent reading—-this allows us to see if those resources pertain to the inner voice of silent reading.

In the second part of the experiment, participants completed the 18-item Varieties of Inner Speech Questionnaire (VISQ; McCarthy-Jones & Fernyhough, 2011), a self-assessment survey that assesses one’s relationship with inner speech. The goal of this was to see if participants who reported experiencing higher levels of inner speech in their everyday lives would be more susceptible to the reading costs prompted by articulatory suppression during rhythm-mismatching limericks. If the differences in reading costs between reading rhythm-matching and -mismatching limericks vanish while repeating this, and if participants who experience higher levels of inner speech are more affected by articulatory suppression, then this would show that these two inner voices occupy the same working memory resources

Based on the eyetracking data, the study found some preliminary evidence that articulatory suppression can diminish the effect of stress clash on silent reading. Three of our four measures (go-past time, probability of fixating a region, and probability of regressing out of a region given that it was fixated during first-pass), suggested that there may be no reading differences between words that match and clash with the lexical stress pattern on the limerick while performing articulatory suppression. This provides some preliminary indication that inner speech occupies working memory and that this machinery overlaps with the inner voice of the rehearsal component of the phonological loop.

The data from the VISQ questionnaire responses were scored along the dimensions of (1) condensed inner speech), (b) dialogic inner speech, (c) other people in inner speech, and (d) evaluative/motivational inner speech according to McCarthy-Jones & Fernyhough (2011), but due to unclear differences in measures across conditions and time constraints, this data is pending analysis.

An important issue for future investigation will be to replicate this experiment after resolving methodological issues with calibration of the eye-tracker. Even though the eye-tracker was calibrated to have a “good” track at the start of each experimental block, the track sometimes appeared to shift slightly as the trials progressed. There may also have possibly been additional settings regarding the eye-tracker that need to be adjusted, such as the minimal amount of time needed for a pause in eye movement to be considered a fixation.

This project was advised by Professor Dan Grodner, without whom this project would not have been possible.