"Subvocalize" has a literal meaning (micro-activation of the vocal cords) which good silent readers avoid. But you're still activating the vocal areas of the brain [0]. If you read much poetry, you'll see that the connection between reading and sound is pretty inseparable.
I'm afraid I'm having a great deal of trouble understanding your point here.
> "Subvocalize" has a literal meaning (micro-activation of the vocal cords) which good silent readers avoid.
Right; so I'm not subvocalising.
> But you're still activating the vocal areas of the brain...
Well, sure. I see the symbol 'cat' and both the memory-complex representing a cat and the audio complex representing the spoken version of the symbol will be activated. That's how memory associations work. The written version of the symbol and the spoken version of the symbol will be strongly associated, because they represent the same concept.
But that doesn't mean I have to wait for the audio to finish playing before I move on to the next symbol. That's a misconception of what's actually happening.
(Plus, of course, hardly anyone reads a word at a time. It's nearly always complete phrases. Frequently not even in the right order.)
> If you read much poetry, you'll see that the connection between reading and sound is pretty inseparable.
Well, no. Poetry is mostly intended to be read aloud; it's supposed to be subvocalised. It's unrelated to prose (or computer programs).
It definitely doesn't mean you have to wait for the audio to finish playing. It does mean that your brain thinks the audio. Which has a lot of consequences, including the energy it takes to think...
Most people do read poetry silently, in the same way they read prose (I don't literally subvocalize), and the sound still is everything. Try reading these two poems silently:
I'm sorry, that's simply not true. At least for me. It may be true for you.
From the things you've said, I suspect you're a word-at-a-time reader, treating words as a sequential symbol stream, processing them as if they were speech. This is just one of the several different styles of reading. Others exist.
I am, as I mentioned above, a phrase-at-a-time reader. I take in multiple symbols at a time, and not necessarily in sequence. If I had to think through the audio of a phrase, this simply wouldn't work. It also means that I would be unable to read symbols that didn't have an audio equivalent.
Right now I'm working with Smalltalk. One of its operators is ~~. How is this pronounced? Don't know, don't care. It's just ~~. When I perceive it, I don't perceive 'tilde tilde'; it's a ~~.
(Also, if you aren't reading Scotland's worst poet aloud, you are wasting him.)
I read more like a page at a time. Some might accuse me of being a page-at-a-time writer.
Compare the way you perceive "~~" to the way you perceive "++". I hear these as "sig sig" and "lus lus". (Or rather, as "slus," because that's a further Hoon abbreviation, but never mind.) You don't hear the former at all; but you hear the latter as "plus plus," don't you?
This is because "tilde tilde" is so heavy your brain doesn't want to do the work of hearing it out. But overriding that connection doesn't save energy, which is why you do hear "plus plus." Your brain has to think the very complicated little thought, "squiggle I don't want to pronounce." It would much rather have a sound.
It's torture enough to read McGonagall silently. Out loud? Who would try that? It's tantamount to suicide.
> You don't hear the former at all; but you hear the latter as "plus plus," don't you?
I really do not. A short silence, both of them. I suppose it depends on how you normally code. I have never had a need for speaking out code and am not well versed in it.
I experience reading similarly to you. I will often become familiar with written words before I know how to pronounce them. When I want to say the word for the first time, I will have to pause and think about how it would sound out loud.
This is especially true of code and symbols. For example, consider this poem
> is it already too dark
> to play tennis with a racket
> i asked?
> while I code with [
and contrast with this one
> The house filled with laughter
> from mother and daughter
> Both were fiends
> but neither friends
In my head I pronounce it as "snake snake" which I think is OK for specialized operators like that. But on the whole I prefer to use Smalltalk keyword-syntax for more understandable method names. I think binary operators make sense for commonly used operations which are FREQUENTLY used. If they are not, better to use English. #*$!:-)
[0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23223279