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Inner Speech

When asked to reflect on their subjective experience, people often report that it involves a voice or voices speaking internally. Inner speech (also called verbal thinking, covert self-talk, internal monologue, and internal dialogue) has been proposed to develop in childhood through the gradual internalization of dialogues with other individuals, resulting in an internalized “conversation” with the self. Inner speech has been argued to be theoretically important for the development of verbal mediation of cognitive processes in childhood, self-awareness, and psychiatric symptoms such as auditory-verbal hallucinations. Future research priorities include further specification of the mechanisms of internalization, methodological improvements in the study of covert and partially internalized speech, and progress in the measurement of inner speech through experience sampling, dual-task paradigms, and neurophysiological methods.

Vygotsky's Theory of Inner Speech

Although philosophical ideas about inner speech date back as far as Plato, the fullest theory of its development was put forward by Lev Semonovich Vygotsky. Vygotsky proposed that inner speech is the developmental outcome of a process of internalization, through which social speech with others is transformed into an internal dialogue. Vygotsky saw support for his theory in children's overt self-directed speech (private speech) during cognitive tasks, viewing it as a transitional stage in the transformation of interpersonal dialogues into intrapersonal ones. Private speech and inner speech thus have roles in the self-regulation of cognition and behavior, with children gradually taking on greater strategic responsibility for activities previously requiring the input of an expert other.

The transition from social to private to inner speech is accompanied by significant syntactic and semantic transformations, notably the syntactic abbreviation that results in inner speech having a “note-form” quality compared with external speech. Semantic transformations identified by Vygotsky include the predominance of sense over meaning (whereby personal, private meanings achieve a greater prominence than conventional, public ones), the process of agglutination (the development of hybrid words signifying complex concepts), and the infusion of sense (whereby specific elements of inner language become infused with more semantic associations than are present in their conventional meanings). It has been suggested that inner speech should take two distinct forms: expanded inner speech, in which internal dialogue retains many of the acoustic properties and turn-taking qualities of external dialogue, and condensed inner speech, in which the semantic and syntactic transformations of internalization are complete.

Methodological Issues

Because of its invisibility to external observation, inner speech has proved resistant to empirical research. Indirect methods include analysis of children's utterances during cognitive tasks, which has supported Vygotsky's ideas about the internalization, development, and self-regulatory functions of private speech. Dual-task paradigms have shown that the disruption of covert articulatory mechanisms can impair functioning on tasks such as task switching and short-term memory. Direct methods for studying inner speech include self-report questionnaires (criticized for depending on potentially unreliable introspective processes) and thought protocols (involving the recording of what participants say when “thinking aloud,” a method limited by dependence on verbal formulation of subjective experience). Some limitations are avoided by experience sampling methods such as descriptive experience sampling, in which trained participants are interviewed about their experience immediately before the sounding of an electronic bleep.

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