This is intriguing. When I learned that a lot of people do not have inner monologue, I was fascinated by the fact that people can differ on such seemingly fundamental way of being. Maybe those who have it just have a "tee" that pipes into words.
I found this out a few years ago and I was shocked that the way I read wasn’t universal. I have since been practicing reducing/eliminating subvocalization and I am getting better, and it allows me to increase my reading speed significantly. It also serves as an excellent example of how different our internal mental processes can be, and how completely unaware we are that there could be any other way to think than our own.
Reading speed slams to a speech-paced crawl until the reader can "not think of a pink elephant" again.