His research convinced me that any tool that wants to parse any spoken language absolutely has to incorporate vocalization information. Also, it convinced me that while it's possible that some people (esp. deaf from birth) can learn alternative ways of reading that don't involve vocalization, these are unnatural for humans, hard to learn and have poorer yield.
So, yeah, maybe some people don't read their code out loud to themselves, but most do, and for most of those who do this makes things easier. So, even if there's a way around it, it's not worth considering when we are talking about ease. People who don't do it are "playing with a handicap", they aren't in the competition for the easiest way to do things.
Also, I'm not convinced that having an internal monologue is the same as reading text using inner voice. Most people learn to read by first reading out loud, and only later learning to use inner voice. Only few people continue on to learn advanced reading techniques which allow to skip selectively and to perform some other mental manipulations on the text, but these techniques also often involve some internal vocalization, but it wouldn't produce the equivalent of speech. More like how people who have to control their computer with voice commands learn all kinds of shortcuts / ways to invoke functionality hard to describe using regular speech elements with clicking noises, whistles etc.
Not necessarily, e.g.:
> Hurlburt … estimates that inner monologue is a frequent thing for 30 to 50 per cent of people. [https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/inner-monologue-...]
For myself, I rarely read out Haskell code ‘literally’ (to the extent that I read any code literally at all; I’m not sure I have much of an internal monologue). Instead I tend to perceive it at a higher level: say, ‘modify a state variable s to fromMaybe s (f s)’ for ‘modify $ \s -> fromMaybe s (f s)’. Reading it out character-by-character would be as pointless as reading an ordinary word that way, like reading ‘cee-aye-tee’ instead of ‘cat’.