Many scholars argue that in ancient Greco-Roman culture, reading aloud was the norm, as seen in examples like Augustine's Confessions, where Augustine sees someone reading silently and sees this as highly unusual. Paul Saenger's Space Between Words argues that the shift to silent reading in Europe was closely tied to word spacing in medieval manuscripts*, and I think Ivan Illych argues something similar in In the Vineyard of the Text. (Of course, some other scholars dispute these theories.)
I've recently read Wu Cheng'En's Journey to the West (Ming Dynasty) and some Tang-dynasty poetry (Li Bai) from China, and I was wondering if there was a similar shift from reading aloud to reading silently in pre-modern Chinese culture, moving from ancient texts like the Book of Songs to the Classic Novels. So: what were common reading practices in ancient China, and was there a likely shift from reading aloud to reading silently? (If this should be directed to a different exchange, my apologies!)
*Edited to add citations: Paul Saenger, Space Between Words, 1997: https://books.google.com/books?id=w3vZaFoaa3EC&pg=PA1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false [see especially the intro and final chapter; the intro also makes the point that Chinese as a character-based language is much easier to learn silently than, say, Latin]. For the opposing view (thanks CMW!), which seems to be the scholarly consensus at this point, see A. K. Gavrilov, "Techniques in Classical Reading," The Classical Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 1 (1997), pp. 56-73, https://www.jstor.org/stable/639597.
