Everyone seems to have a separate reading voice in their mind. But studies show there's more to it

It's not unusual for people to visualize things and create scenarios in their minds or imagine different voices for different characters in a story while they are reading. Recent studies by New York University Professor of Psychology Ruvanee Vilhauer revealed that most humans create a reading voice inside their heads to make the experience better. Moreover, many of them alter their voices with respect to the characters to consume the content in the form of a movie.

In the first analysis, Vilhauer used reports on the internet regarding people's reading experiences. After going through 136 posts, she concluded that  82.5% of people do hear a voice when they read. These voices adapt distinctive qualities like "identity, gender, pitch, loudness, and emotional tone” to make the experience richer. Almost 50% of the people who have IRV possess one reading voice which is generally their own while some also use a popular voice as their IRV such as an actor or a celebrated personality. Some claim to have multiple narrators in their heads, which change as per the requirement of the literature. If the narration has a letter from a family member then the voice would change to represent that particular character. If he or she has been described as British, that would be the accent the IRV will use throughout the reading exercise. 

Vilahaier conducted another study, where she used volunteered and provided questionnaires to the people in her subject pool, about their reading experience. Four-fifths of the people confessed to having an Inner Reading Voice while 20% of the volunteers “understood words being read without hearing an inner voice.” The frequency with which this IRV happened to participants was also enquired with the questionnaire. About 45% had IRV most of the time while reading and 19% shared that they had the ability to switch the voice on and off as per their wishes.

Emma Barber's study proved that IRV depended on the reader's ethnicity. Their internal voice adopts their own accent, which has a major impact on the way they perceive literature. Poems and limericks may have words that need to be pronounced in a certain way for the intended effect. Hence, the perception of creative outputs can vary significantly when IRV comes into play.

Unfortunately, the subject of IRV and inner monologue hasn't received much attention in academics, and research regarding them is scarce. But some social media users shared their shock at the discovery that certain individuals don't have an inner monologue. The whole thing started with @KylePlantEmoji posting the status, "Fun fact: some people have an internal narrative and some don't As in, some people's thoughts are like sentences they "hear", and some people just have abstract non-verbal thoughts, and have to consciously verbalize them And most people aren't aware of the other type of person." Others in the comment section could not fathom that there are people in the world who don't engage in a dialogue with their own selves, something that they only found out thanks to the studies.