A couple of weeks ago, I asked: What do you want to know? What are you curious about in terms of communication?
Happily, you’re a curious bunch of readers! Many of you sent in questions, ideas, and topics you’ve been pondering about how we connect with others, why, and why it matters.
Reader Stephen asked: How do we instinctively discern the difference between someone reading from a script and someone speaking extemporaneously?And how can a skilled speaker employ some hallmarks of improvisational speech to seem like they’re searching for the next word, when they know exactly what they’re doing?
I’m addressing the first part of Stephen’s question today, and the second tomorrow.
This topic (speaking vs. reading) comes up frequently when we are coaching people who are used to reading from notes. As audience members, we can easily detect the difference when someone is reading and when they are speaking without notes, even if they have rehearsed extensively. But how can we tell? What are the clues?
It probably won’t surprise you to learn that I’m not a neurologist. So while I did some research to dig into this question, it’s certainly not definitive. But! What I learned was interesting.
First I learned that, when we read aloud, the impulse starts at the primary visual cortex, then travels to the posterior speech area. From there it goes to a language-processing region called Broca’s area, then to the primary motor cortex (presumably to get your mouth and vocal cords and everything actually talking.)
Things are way murkier when we’re generating speech from thoughts in our heads. Work done with people suffering from epilepsy and other neurological disorders provides a lot of insight into all the things that happen when we decide to speak. What I could glean, though, is that the process is different from the one I outlined above regarding reading aloud, involving many areas of the brain working together at incredible speed.
So how can we tell? If you’re in the audience and someone is reading a speech from notes, how do you know? (Big caveat here: There are many very good speakers who can read a prepared speech, and it doesn’t sound like they are reading. They are typically a) well-coached, b) very experienced, and c) good at writing the way they speak.)
First, from a purely behavioral standpoint, looking at words on a page or a monitor often means we’re not looking at the audience. That could be our inital clue that someone is reading rather than speaking extemporaneously.
Second, many of us have a “reading voice” we have used for decades, since we had to read aloud in school. Typically, the voice is articulating one word while the eyes are looking ahead to other words along the line in the sentence, navigating punctuation and line breaks as well as grappling with anything that may be unfamiliar.
All of this processing tends to constrict the reading voice into a narrower range than our speaking voice, so we’re not as expressive as we would be otherwise. That’s another unconscious clue that says, “They’re reading.”
And third, and this is a big one, when we read aloud we actually use punctuation and pauses. Unlike when we’re “simply speaking,” (for better or worse), we acknowledge the periods, commas, and paragraph breaks when we’re reading aloud. The voice drops at the end of the sentence, indicating a period. It lifts, indicating a question. There’s an indentation to begin the next paragraph, so we pause. Additionally, written language doesn’t reflect the natural vocal cadences we use to express meaning when we’re talking.
All of this points us back to the salient point that reading begins in the visual cortex! We see the comma, so we respond. Most of us don’t think in punctuation marks, so we’re less likely to use them reliably when we’re simply speaking.
And so onto what I think of as the big question. Why does it matter if someone is reading or talking? I think there’s a clue in this quote from Aristotle. Aristotle said: Speech is the representation of the mind, and writing is the representation of speech.
In most situations, we prefer to feel that the person speaking to us is coming up with these thoughts from their brain, straight from their mind to ours. The sense that they are reading can feel like a barrier between their thought and our hearing.
The speaker isn’t quite inhabiting the message when they’re reading from notes, and as I pointed out above, they are often not available to connect completely with the audience when they are reading.
Stay tuned for part 2 of Stephen’s question tomorrow!
