In fact, it has been shown that older and younger adults' performances were equal when none of them were allowed to
subvocally rehearse the digits (Gerhand, 1994; cited in Phillips & Hamilton, 2001).
Elsewhere, however, I have argued that what we normally speak of as listening is behaving (
subvocally) (Schlinger, 2008a).
This study was based on 20 right-handed adults of both genders (M = 44.4 years, SD = 14.4 years), who decided whether the presented word represented a living or nonliving object and
subvocally articulated that decision.
The authors posited the slow rate provided students enough time to
subvocally read the words before or after the word was presented, but the fast rate condition did not allow for opportunities to respond.
That is, he was encouraged to pronounce the word to be spelled either vocally or
subvocally, to segment it into phonemes, and to mark each phoneme with the corresponding letter.
There were very few omissions and no overt evidence of painstaking attempts to sound the items out, although a couple of the less-skilled readers were very slow and may have been doing this
subvocally. The mean (total) errors for the two groups of children are set out in Table 3 according to N (high, low) and type of item (word, nonword).
Swain (1995) argues that: In producing the target language (vocally or
subvocally), learners may notice a gap between what they want to say and what they can say, leading them to recognize what they do not know, or know only partially ....
In contrast, children of average and above-average IQ showed virtually no performance gain after instructions to name the stimuli aloud, presumably because they were already naming them spontaneously, but
subvocally, prior to the instruction (34; see also 52, 55, 56, 67, 78, 93).
In the present sample, it was evident that children were consistently counting the buttons (
subvocally or vocally).