Not Everybody Has an Inner Voice: Behavioral Consequences of Anendophasia
Open accessAbstract
It is commonly assumed that inner speech—the experience of thought as occurring in a natural language—is a human universal. Recent evidence, however, suggests that the experience of inner speech in adults varies from near constant to nonexistent. We propose a name for a lack of the experience of inner speech—anendophasia—and report four studies examining some of its behavioral consequences. We found that adults who reported low levels of inner speech ( N = 46) had lower performance on a verbal working memory task and more difficulty performing rhyme judgments compared with adults who reported high levels of inner speech ( N = 47). Task-switching performance—previously linked to endogenous verbal cueing—and categorical effects on perceptual judgments were unrelated to differences in inner speech.
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More frequent self-talk is associated with increased experiences of negative or stressful self-related events.
“More evidence supports the cognitive disruption hypothesis, which predicts that more frequent self-talk is associated with increased experiences of negative or stressful self-related events [114,116].”
From Inner speech as language process and cognitive tool (2023) · cites this paper as [116]
Section 4.6 (page unavailable) reports that participants with more inner speech more often rehearsed and revised conversations, but it does not say they experienced more negative or stressful self-related events. Searches for those events and for the cognitive disruption hypothesis found no passage in our copy establishing the claimed association. (LLM, conf=0.74)
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- Authors
- Nedergaard, J. S. K., & Lupyan, G.
- Affiliations
- University of Copenhagen (DK)
- University of Wisconsin–Madison (US)
- Corresponding author
- Nedergaard, Johanne S. K.
- Venue
- Psychological Science
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2024-05-10
- Volume
- 35
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 780-797
- ISSN
- 0956-7976 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-9280
- OpenAlex
- W4396789929
- Cited by
- 62
- References
- 60
- Citations by year
- 2026: 35 · 2025: 22 · 2024: 5
- FWCI
- 29.59
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- Locations
- Psychological Science (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Research at the University of Copenhagen (University of Copenhagen) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (2020969)
- University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Representations and Identity
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Categorization, perception, and language
- Keywords
- inner speech, verbal working memory, rhyme judgment, task switching, perceptual categorization
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Female, Humans, Judgment, Male, Memory, Short-Term, Speech, Thinking, Young Adult
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