“Textual Prosody” Can Change Impressions of Reading in People With Normal Hearing and Hearing Loss

Recently, dynamic text presentation, such as scrolling text, has been widely used. Texts are often presented at constant timing and speed in conventional dynamic text presentation. However, dynamic text presentation enables visually presented texts to indicate timing information, such as prosody, and the texts might influence the impression of reading. In this paper, we examined this possibility by focusing on the temporal features of digital text in which texts are represented sequentially and with varying speed, duration, and timing. We call this “textual prosody.” We used three types of textual prosody: “Recorded,” “Shuffled,” and “Constant.” Recorded prosody is the reproduction of a reader’s reading with pauses and varying speed that simulates talking. Shuffled prosody randomly shuffles the time course of speed and pauses in the recorded type. Constant prosody has a constant presentation speed and provides no timing information. Experiment 1 examined the effect of textual prosody on people with normal hearing. Participants read dynamic text with textual prosody silently and rated their impressions of texts. The results showed that readers with normal hearing preferred recorded textual prosody and constant prosody at the optimum speed (6 letters/second). Recorded prosody was also preferred at a low presentation speed. Experiment 2 examined the characteristics of textual prosody using an articulatory suppression paradigm. The results showed that some textual prosody was stored in the articulatory loop despite it being presented visually. In Experiment 3, we examined the effect of textual prosody with readers with hearing loss. The results demonstrated that readers with hearing loss had positive impressions at relatively low presentation speeds when the recorded prosody was presented. The results of this study indicate that the temporal structure is processed regardless of whether the input is visual or auditory. Moreover, these results suggest that textual prosody can enrich reading not only in people with normal hearing but also in those with hearing loss, regardless of acoustic experiences.