Inner Speech: Development, Cognitive Functions, Phenomenology, and Neurobiology

By Ben Alderson-Day, Charles Fernyhough. 2015

606 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Inner speech—also known as covert speech or verbal thinking—has been implicated in theories of cognitive development, speech monitoring, executive function, and psychopathology. Despite a growing body of knowledge on its phenomenology, development, and function, approaches to the scientific study of inner speech have remained diffuse and largely unintegrated. This review examines prominent theoretical approaches to inner speech and methodological challenges in its study, before reviewing current evidence on inner speech in children and adults from both typical and atypical populations. We conclude by considering prospects for an integrated cognitive science of inner speech, and present a multicomponent model of the phenomenon informed by developmental, cognitive, and psycholinguistic considerations. Despite its variability among individuals and across the life span, inner speech appears to perform significant functions in human cognition, which in some cases reflect its developmental origins and its sharing of resources with other cognitive processes.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology, Cognitive Science & Psychology

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Social Psychology

In Cognitive Science & Psychology

Citations in the corpus

ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models (2022, background): “A unique feature of human intelligence is the ability to seamlessly combine task-oriented actions with verbal reasoning (or inner speech, Alderson-Day & Fernyhough, 2015), which has been theorized to play an important role in human cognition for enabling self-regulation or strategization (Vygotsky,…”
The brain’s conversation with itself: neural substrates of dialogic inner speech (2015, background): “…thinking—has been implicated in many cognitive functions, including problem-solving, creativity and self-regulation (Morin, 2009; Fernyhough, 2013; Alderson-Day and Fernyhough, 2015a), and disruptions to the ‘internal monologue’ have been linked to varieties of pathology, including…”
Intra-agent speech permits zero-shot task acquisition (2022, background): “For example, our short-term memories tend to commit errors for items that are phonetically but not visually or semantically similar [8, 9], and “self-talk” affects task performance on executive tasks both in children [11, 12] and in adults [7], and has been widely used to improve athletic performanc”
20 years of the default mode network: a review and synthesis (2023, background): “83”