Pairwise comparisons of performance in each group indicated that typically developing participants, but not ASD participants, were adversely affected by articulatory suppression, suggesting an interference effect with inner speech. Only 30-50% of People Have An Inner Monologue, And Suddenly It All Fernyhough C., & Meins E. (2009). Most studies point to private speech being an almost universal feature of development (Winsler, De Len, Wallace, Carlton, & Willson-Quayle, 2003), although there are important individual differences in frequency and quality of self-talk (Lidstone, Meins, & Fernyhough, 2011). Williams and colleagues argued that these results reflect intact inner speech as a mechanism to support recall in ASD, but did not rule out potential qualitative differences in inner speech. In one recent exception, McGonigle-Chalmers, Slater, and Smith (2014) studied the extent to which private speech use is moderated by the presence of another person in the room when 3- to 4-year-old children attempted a novel sorting task. In a second study, Baldo, Bunge, Wilson, and Dronkers (2010) examined problem-solving performance on Ravens Color Progressive Matrices in a sample of 107 patients with left hemisphere stroke lesions and varying levels of language impairment. Rather than seeking the cause of executive functioning development solely in brain maturation, Luria held that that social interaction shapes emerging cortical organization in the preschool years: Social history ties those knots which form definite cortical zones in new relations with each other, and if the use of language . The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the In the nonclinical group, who completed the WCST with and without articulatory suppression, performance was consistently worse when inner speech was blocked, although similar effects were also seen for a visuospatial distractor condition. The data from studies of cognitive flexibility and other executive domains suggest that, even within a given task, inner speech will only be a useful strategy in particular conditions: naming stimuli, for example, appears to speed up response execution, but naming the response required (e.g., stop or go) does not (Kray, Kipp, & Karbach, 2009). For planning, in contrast, there is perhaps less evidence for inner speech having a central role in adult task performance. (2014). The presence or absence of a task could determine the structure of inner speech deployed in a particular situation. Vygotsky, Luria, and the social brain In Sokol B., Mller U., Carpendale J., Young A., & Iarocci G. (CA = covert articulation; PS = phonological store). Whitehouse A. J., Maybery M. T., & Durkin K. (2006). Despite these concerns, the inner speech account of AVHs remains a powerful explanatory tool for at least some voice-hearing experiences, and one that is worthy of further investigation. Hartsuiker R. J., & Kolk H. H. J. One promising avenue of research here is the use of microanalytic methods to study exactly when within tasks different kinds of self-talk are deployed (see Kuvalja, Verma, & Whitebread, 2014, for a recent example of such research in an SLI sample). Fernyhough (Fernyhough, 2004; Fernyhough & McCarthy-Jones, 2013) has argued that attention to the multifaceted nature of inner speech, particularly the distinction between its condensed and expanded forms, can be instructive in accounting for the paradoxical alien yet self quality of such experiences (Leudar & Thomas, 2000). We tend to assume that our internal monologue "speaks" in words - but it turns out that, for many of us, it's much more complicated. Lidstone and colleagues interpreted their results as an example of delayed inner speech internalization, rather than a qualitative difference in verbal strategy use. Baldo J. V., Dronkers N. F., Wilkins D., Ludy C., Raskin P., & Kim J. Performance and private speech of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder while taking the Tower of Hanoi test: Effects of depth of search, diagnostic subtype, and methylphenidate. Jack, 2004), the question of how training in reporting on ones own inner experience might increase the accuracy of self-reports of inner speech remains an intriguing one for future research. AVHs and other putative pathologies of inner speech such as rumination could be considered as mis-exaptations, defined as adaptations that have reached a degree of specialization that is deleterious to the organism. However, research in this area has not typically distinguished between overt and covert forms of speech, making it hard to draw strong conclusions about the role that specifically internal representation of speech might play. Diederen K. M. J., De Weijer A. D., Daalman K., Blom J. D., Neggers S. F. W., Kahn R. S., & Sommer I. E. C. (2010). (2013) reported no effect of articulatory suppression on adult performance, but effects of random number generation (posited to block general executive resources) and concurrent auditory localization (requiring spatial working memory). For instance, two studies by Geva and colleagues reported on inner speech and language skills in aphasia (Geva et al., 2011, 2010). Fernyhough C. (2013). First, it could be argued that the evidence for the existence of AVHs in deaf individuals implies that a misattribution of inner speech is less important to explaining the phenomenon than a more general misattribution of a communicative or articulatory code: that is, it would appear to force a generalization of the self-monitoring account of AVHs, beyond the specifics of speech and into a more general conception of communication. Stronger and more specific links between psychopathology and inner speech are evident in research on worry and anxiety. ), The role of inner speech in task switching: A dual-task investigation, Language and executive functions: The effect of articulatory suppression on executive functioning in children. Private speech: Four studies and a review of theories. However, evidence of typical verbal strategy use in ASD children has also been reported in some cases (Williams, Happ, & Jarrold, 2008; Winsler, Abar, Feder, Schunn, & Rubio, 2007). Other self-report scales assess features such as inner speech frequency, content, and context (e.g., Duncan & Cheyne, 1999). One area that has seen an increased attention to inner speech is the study of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). An alternative method of studying inner speech, which overlaps with methods used in auditory imagery research, is to ask participants to make judgments based on the contents of their inner speech. Given the proposed role for inner speech in resting-state cognition, there is also a need for functional connectivity studies focusing on how the inner speech network modulates the activities of the default mode network and various task-positive networks, in both healthy participants and patients with disorders such as schizophrenia. Developmental changes in using verbal self-cueing in task-switching situations: The impact of task practice and task-sequencing demands. In Lurias view, a new form of executive functioning emerges when prelinguistic capacities for monitoring, planning, and inhibition of behavior enter into interfunctional relations with language abilities (Fernyhough, 2010). Inner speech is a paradoxical phenomenon. (Eds.). Senay I., Albarracn D., & Noguchi K. (2010). Waters F., Woodward T., Allen P., Aleman A., & Sommer I. Cortical activations during auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia: A coordinate-based meta-analysis, Reevaluating key evidence for the development of rehearsal: Phonological similarity effects in children are subject to proportional scaling artifacts. Lidstone J., Meins E., & Fernyhough C. (2011). Inner speech also appears to be an important part of silent reading (see Perrone-Bertolotti et al., 2014, for a recent review). Such data do not prove a dissociation between inner and overt speech, but they do support the notion that inner speech is not simply identical to overt speech processes at a neural level. And if inner speech is a multicomponent phenomenon, then multiple resources will be recruited to represent more or less featurally rich inner speech, or inner speech in the voices of other people, meaning that many more pathways than a typical BrocaWernicke network may be involved. First, although motor processes can affect certain kinds of auditory imagery (Hubbard, 2013), subsuming inner speech within imagery would appear to underestimate its articulatory component, in which words are usually actively voiced and expressed rather than simply being sounded out. It is not at all clearand would seem counterintuitive to suggestthat inner speech is imagined in the same way that one can imagine the sound of a siren, or even imagine hearing ones own voice on a recording, notwithstanding the fact that some individuals may experience inner speech more as a hearing than as a speaking phenomenon. Mechanisms underlying the self-talkperformance relationship: The effects of motivational self-talk on self-confidence and anxiety. Potential pathways suggested by MRI studies of hallucinations include right hemisphere homologues of language areas (Sommer et al., 2008), hippocampal cortex (Diederen, Neggers et al., 2010), and subcortical structures (Hoffman, Fernandez, Pittman, & Hampson, 2011). While in overt speech errors occurred reflecting both lexical bias (the tendency to produce a real word rather than a nonword), and phonemic similarity effects (such as substituting reef and leaf), in inner speech only the former were reported. Regarding the viral kerfuffle over the inner speech haves and have nots, he chuckles a bit and says he frequently hears people claim that they have an ever-present inner monologue - but his experiments show that this is not always true. Specifically, they argue that inner speech retains deep features, such as lexical and semantic information, but typically does not represent surface-level information such as phonological detail. Some People Don't Have An Inner Monologue And I Am One Of Them For example, Morin, Uttl, and Hamper (2011) surveyed 380 undergraduates views on inner speech in an open-format procedure where participants were asked to list as many verbalisations as they typically address to themselves (p. 1715). Researchers have addressed the question of the phenomenological richness of inner speech by studying errors and delays in its production. Positive predictors were more varied: minimizing inner speech was negatively associated with anxiety and anger but not depression, while positively oriented self-talk was linked to lower depression but higher levels of anger. Increased blood flow in Brocas area during auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia. Challenges for future research include developing improved methods of assessing subjective experience in the scanner that will allow a closer integration of mind-wandering phenomenology with information on neural activations. Compared with controls, patients were impaired on both inner and overt speech, and performance in both was closely correlated. Private speech appears to have a role in emotional expression and regulation (Atencio & Montero, 2009; Day & Smith, 2013), planning for communicative interaction (San Martin, Montero, Navarro, & Biglia, 2014), theory of mind (Fernyhough & Meins, 2009), self-discrimination (Fernyhough & Russell, 1997), fantasy (Olszewski, 1987), and creativity (White & Daugherty, 2009). Although fundamentally a visuospatial problem, the number of possible moves to a solution creates a problem-space bigger than visuospatial working memory capacity will typically allow, meaning that verbal strategies often come into play. Their evidence comes from a comparison of tongue-twister errors in overt and inner speech, in which participants report on the internal errors that they make. There is evidence to support Vygotskys claim that self-regulatory speech goes underground in middle childhood to form inner speech, with private speech peaking in incidence around age 5 (Kohlberg, Yaeger, & Hjertholm, 1968) and then declining in parallel with a growth in inner speech use (Damianova, Lucas, & Sullivan, 2012) as defined by Fernyhough and Fradleys (2005) criteria. Alongside this, monologic or dialogic forms of inner speech can be deployed to support nonverbal executive processes where this is required (as in the examples of switch tasks, or cognitive control). This, however, would appear to confuse two separable dimensions: first, the extent to which an inner verbal representation is experienced as being articulated rather than being heard, and second, the extent to which a verbal representation has an identity belonging to self or other. Important information on the psychological significance of inner speech is also provided by studies of how typical processes of inner speech development and production are perturbed in atypical populations, including developmental disorders and psychiatric illnesses in adulthood. Kopecky H., Chang H. T., Klorman R., Thatcher J. E., & Borgstedt A. D. (2005). (Eds. Evidence for the default networks role in spontaneous cognition. Moreover, worrying was more generally associated with a rise in anxious affect during the experiment, while trauma recall showed a closer link to depressive thinking. Despite its proposed origins in social interaction (Furrow, 1992; Goudena, 1987), social influences on private speech have not been studied extensively in recent years. Communicating without a functioning language system: Implications for the role of language in mentalizing. Working memory and the control of action: Evidence from task switching, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Dialogic thinking In Winsler A., Fernyhough C., & Montero I. However, it is important to recognise that the use of differing cognitive strategies in this group is a mark of variation, not deficiency: the adult participants with ASD in Williams et al.s (2012) study could complete tower tasks apparently without recourse to verbal strategies, so intervention in this case would be inappropriate. (2009). In adults, inner speech continues to be implicated in tasks that require switching between different responses and rules (Baddeley, Chincotta, & Adlam, 2001), as it does in children (Cragg & Nation, 2010). The methodological challenges that attend the study of inner speech have led to a focus on its observable developmental precursor, private speech, as a window onto its development. & Shah P. This filling out of a response is in some ways analogous to effects that have been observed for auditory imagery, where participants can have vivid and sometimes involuntary auditory experiences in the gaps of familiar songs or other sounds (e.g., Kraemer, Macrae, Green, & Kelley, 2005). (2006). The use of introspective evidence in cognitive science. (2003). Elsewhere, Pickering and Garrod (2013) have proposed that inner speech might be a stripped-down product of forward models that enables the detection of errors in overt speech before they occur, while Oppenheim (2013) has suggested that inner speech may constitute an internal loop consisting entirely of forward model predictions, bypassing the need for recruitment of standard production and comprehension systems. Moving beyond inner speech production to the processes involved in generating external speech, there is a large body of psycholinguistic research on the role of inner speech as a potential error monitor for external speech (e.g., Hartsuiker & Kolk, 2001; Nooteboom, 2005), a full discussion of which is beyond the scope of this article (see Hickok, 2012, for a review). Geva et al. Accessibility Their findings echoed earlier studies of self-verbalization, which also highlighted frequent reports of evaluative and mnemonic experiences in inner speech (Duncan & Cheyne, 1999). Using a task that included pictures that were either phonologically similar, visuospatially similar, or dissimilar in both respects, both ASD and control children showed evidence of the phonological similarity effect, proposed to occur when inner speech is used to recode pictures into words to assist recall. Taylor referred to the dramatic silence that had taken residency inside my head (pp. But it turns out there are people who have never experienced it. However, recent data from a questionnaire study on private sign and inner speech by Zimmermann and Brugger (2013) suggest the opposite. Also known as internal dialogue, inner monologue is a voice inside your head. In addition, deaf participants reported greater use of positive/motivational inner speech compared with hearing participants, although the questionnaire used to measure this, the Inventory on Self-Communication for Adults, did not ask participants to distinguish whether this was a specifically verbal or signed experience. Making phoneme substitutions in inner speech would suggest that specific phonological features are encoded in inner speech and available to internal inspection. Such studies have been interpreted as showing that verbal depressive thoughts either have their own sensory qualities or are accompanied by concurrent imagery, although investigators do not always ask about the verbality of these cognitions: Newby and Moulds (2012) specifically asked their participants about frequency of verbal thoughts, but Moritz et al. What Is An Inner Monologue & Why Some People Don't Have One - YourTango As noted, this distinction bears strongly on the debate about how much inner speech retains phenomenological features of overt speech, such as tone, accent, and timbre (see What is the Relation Between Inner Speech and Overt Speech?). McGuire P. K., Silbersweig D. A., Murray R. M., David A. S., Frackowiak R. S., & Frith C. D. (1996). An individual differences analysis by the latter group indicated that tower performance was closely related to visuospatial rather than verbal working memory skills (Gilhooly, Wynn, Phillips, Logie, & Della Sala, 2002; see also Cheetham, Rahm, Kaller, & Unterrainer, 2012). Although it has not yet been the focus of neuroimaging studies (not least because of the difficulty, noted above, of capturing heterogeneous forms of inner speech in the scanner), it is possible to speculate on the neural substrates of condensed and expanded inner speech. It is possible that the move from condensed to expanded inner speech will involve translation of such representations into something more fully voiced, via articulation in the left IFG and phonological representation in STG structures. Conditions where a given response needs to be maintained or regulated (as in set-shifting) may be more likely to require an expanded and task-specific form of inner speech (and in some cases private speech), while more exploratory, open-ended forms of verbal thinking could remain at a more abstracted, condensed level. 152 comments Best dbzgtfan4ever 12 yr. ago Dr. Russell Hurlburt actually studies inner experience. Imagined speaking and hearing both localized to bilateral temporal cortex (which was interpreted as indicating the auditory simulation process), but imagery for speaking localized first to left parietal cortex (Tian & Poeppel, 2010). Thus, inner speech does not appear necessary for tasks involving logical reasoning, even for verbal material. Alderson-Day B., Weis S., McCarthy-Jones S., Moseley P., Smailes D., & Fernyhough C. (2015). This prediction was confirmed: only ASD participants showed a significant effect of cognitive profile, with NV > V participants showing the least interference from articulatory suppression on an arithmetic switching task. In a behavioral study, Geva et al. Contemporary models of speech processing suggest at least two cortical streams affecting speech perception: a left lateralized dorsal stream, connecting speech motor processing (left inferior frontal gyrus and insula) with posterior temporal regions, and a bilateral ventral stream linking hippocampal structures and the inferior and middle temporal gyri (Hickok & Poeppel, 2007). We argue that there are good reasons to retain the label of inner speech as a related but broadly separable process to auditory imagery. One implication of this view is that the functional system(s) of ToM will evidence shifting patterns of relation across age of the component neural systems, consistent with evidence that ToM networks in the brain crystallize from more diffuse agglomerations of neural foci in the course of childhood (Saxe, Carey, & Kanwisher, 2004). Winsler A., Diaz R. M., & Montero I. People Are Just Realising That Some Don't Have An Internal Monologue Although they did not specifically ask about emotional content of inner speech, the VISQ factors also picked out tendencies toward negative emotional states: evaluative inner speech and the presence of other people in inner speech were both positively associated with trait anxiety and, to a lesser extent, depression. One reason for this is that inner speech by definition cannot be directly observed, limiting the scope for its empirical study and requiring the development of methodologies for studying it indirectly (see Methodological Issues). Despite its apparent importance for human cognition, inner speech has received relatively little attention from psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists, partly due to methodological problems involved in its study. Key to most of such models is that inner speech is posited as part of a speech production system involving predictive simulations or forward models of linguistic representations. Inner experience in the scanner: can high fidelity apprehensions of inner experience be integrated with fMRI? Hermer-Vazquez L., Spelke E. S., & Katsnelson A. S. (1999). Baron-Cohen S., Wheelwright S., Skinner R., Martin J., & Clubley E. (2001). Key questions that have been examined include the emergence and apparent extinction of private speech, the social context within which self-directed speech is observed, and the role of verbal mediation in supporting specific activities. Inner speech has also been proposed to have an important role in metacognition, self-awareness, and self-understanding (Morin, 2005).