I just tried your counting trick and all I wound up with was two simultaneous voices going through my head.
On the reverse side, for anyone who doesn't hear text as they read, I'm really curious how your mind handles the following paragraph. I can't imagine processing it in any way besides taking it one word at a time, but that is likely a limit of my own imagination.
> During winter, and touring the humor, poignant observation to Hobbes, as if to created as an outside action—you can be found him for examples aliens typically The Family Circus, criticized him is the thing through Saturday, December 16, 1995. Mom's first appeared in some newspaper chapeaux during nature is the only babysitter are characters in another.
I don't hear a voice in my head when I read. When I try to read that paragraph, I can't get past the 4th word without an uncomfortable mental pause. In order to continue reading I do have to "hear" it as I'm reading it. How did you come up with this?
It's a random Markov chain based on the Calvin and Hobbes wikipedia. I can't really take credit - the source I listed was the generator I used.
My (completely unsupported) suspicion is that individuals who don't subvocalize tend to take advantage of common structures in texts to process everything at the sentence level, instead of the word level. The catch is that sentences which don't match their common expected structure tend to get lost in the shuffle. For example, when reading that "the man who hunts ducks out on weekends", individuals who don't sub-vocalize would be more likely to miss the "out" and believe that the hunter hunts ducks.
As part of my hypothesis, I would suspect that the following example, which isn't a Markov chain, but rather a quote from Finnegan's Wake, will also force people to switch to "hearing" when they read, simply because of the unusual sentence structure.
> In the ignorance that implies the impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality
I "hear text" as I read, but I'm not sure how it would affect how I tried handling that paragraph. The "voice" is generally monotonic, but I do glance back to reference words (especially because I didn't notice this was markov text). When I read, I take in entire chunks of words at a time and automatically pull out interesting words for the voice to read. I'm not entirely sure if I can describe what the voice says, but I'll give it a shot after deconstructing the paragraph.
* "During winter" ok
* "and touring the humor" ok
* "poignant observation to Hobbes" ???
* glance back at "humor", then "touring" for more context, whatever
* "as if to created as an outside action" - I didn't even notice "as if to created" was nonsense
* glance back to "observation", "humor", "during" to reconcile this weird construct
* "you can be found him" segfault, brain realizes this is nonsense and refuses to try to parse anymore
* "for examples" one last chunk it seems like I was processing when my brain realized it was nonsense
What was passed on to the internal voice (maybe? the more I think about this the more it seems inaccurate, but that might just be garbage in garbage out. And the fact that I've read this about 5 times so far). :
"During winter, touring humor, poignant observation Hobbes, created outside action - you can be found him for" ... unsure ... "criticized is the thing through Saturday $DATE_HERE$. $PARENT$ first appeared newspaper chapeaux during nature is babysitter characters another"
I do think it's interesting that as I get more confused I start focusing on words that would have been filtered out but at the same time I lose my grasp on the big picture.
This is incredibly anecdotal, but I hope you gain some insight.
On the reverse side, for anyone who doesn't hear text as they read, I'm really curious how your mind handles the following paragraph. I can't imagine processing it in any way besides taking it one word at a time, but that is likely a limit of my own imagination.
> During winter, and touring the humor, poignant observation to Hobbes, as if to created as an outside action—you can be found him for examples aliens typically The Family Circus, criticized him is the thing through Saturday, December 16, 1995. Mom's first appeared in some newspaper chapeaux during nature is the only babysitter are characters in another.
Source: http://projects.haykranen.nl/markov/demo/