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Originally Posted by Death by Mirrors
(Post 1935226)
Funny thing is, I'm the complete opposite to those subvocalizing folks: my reading speed is like quadruple my talking speed, and whenever I hear someone speak about complicated matters, I need to concentrate and imagine the words as a written text to fully understand them.
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Quadruple isn't that crazy. 100-120wpm is a fairly typical speaking speed in English (with professionals who actually practice talking able to get up to 200wpm while remaining intelligible) and 300wpm is considered common among college students as I mentioned -- so that's triple already. Subvocalizing isn't limited by the physical constraints of your body. You can't flub your words when you're subvocalizing, so that's capable of going MUCH faster than actual speech.
That said, it's probably completely irrelevant to your case. :P Some people are just wired differently, and your language center is probably built a lot more visually than the average. (People who are fluent in sign language take similar advantage of the fact that you can process language independently of any specific sense.)
I've tried visualizing words in my head as I listen to someone. It's interesting, but I actually can't do it very well. It takes too much attention to translate the language from auditory form to visual form, so if I'm trying to see the words in my head I'm more likely to forget what it is I'm actually hearing. I have a similar issue when listening to music sung in Japanese; I'm good enough at the language to pick up on key ideas in the lyrics, but if you ask me to translate what they said I'm going to blank out on it because trying to retain that mental context AND synthesize new information at the same time... yeah, that doesn't work too well for me.
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I had my hearing tested in elementary school, because they noticed I was sometimes slow to respond, could not retain all information on the phone, or identify my name among other background noise. Results proved I hear well enough, and I was smart too, so since then my aunts considered me a snotty brat.
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That's a symptom of a sensory processing disorder, and there's a lot of evidence to suggest that at least some types of ADHD fall into that category. I definitely have that issue myself -- my hearing is perfectly fine, but my ability to pick up on sounds against background noise is awful and it's been getting worse as I get older. |
