Course information

Try counting to ten ‘in your head’. For most people, doing so requires mentally verbalizing each number in sequence (‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’, and so on). This silent tokening of linguistic elements, known as inner speech, is involved not only in rehearsing tasks but also in complex problem-solving, decision-making, autobiographical reasoning as well as in various psychopathological conditions. Unfortunately, the intuitiveness of the pre-theoretical notion of inner speech does not extend to the scientific domain.
In this block seminar, we will explore recent empirically informed debates on the nature of inner speech, its functions, developmental trajectory, and connections to mental health. For instance, we will consider whether inner speech should be conceived as a form of (internalized) speech, as thinking in words or as an imaginative process. We will also address the paradoxical nature of inner speech (what is the point of speaking to oneself if one already knows what one is going to say?), and discuss what other cognitive functions inner speech might have, if not that of conveying information. Finally, we will examine the role of specific forms of inner speech such as rumination, thought insertion, and auditory verbal hallucinations, in the symptomatology of mental health conditions.