Endophasy/endophasia—Inner speech. (Medical Dictionary, 2009)

Inner speech—The silent process of thought and production of unuttered words. This function is essential to thinking that is done with words. (Medical Dictionary, 2009)

Also referred to as verbal thinking, inner speaking, covert self-talk, internal monologue, and internal dialogue. (Alderson-Day & Fernyhough, 2015, p. 931)

From an early age we talk to ourselves. At first we babble and imitate. Then we begin to articulate our actions out loud, sometimes in the presence of others, but mostly for ourselves. In his theory of cognitive development, psychologist Jean Piaget declares that this self-talk, or “egocentric speech” dies off by the age a child starts going to school. This is when the primary “autistic state” of the child’s world is subsumed by the dominant influence of the external world. To Piaget, egocentric speech is a symptom, a by-product of this transitional phase of learning to accept the organisational thoughts of the adult world . However, developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky believes something more profound is going on with both egocentric speech and its internalisation. He proposes that egocentric speech is not merely a by-product but an integral part of the developmental process as it assists the child to process and structure thoughts and actions (Vygotsky, 1986). ¶ 1

Undertaking experiments where the child is confronted with difficult tasks, Vygotsky discovers firstly that self-talk increases, and secondly that a child more prone to this mechanism is more successful at negotiating difficult tasks. Vygotsky believes this egocentric speech, which he calls private speech, is indicative of an essential development of thought, from socialised speech to individualised thinking. Furthermore, he proposes that it doesn’t just die out as higher thought processing develops, but in fact “goes underground”, becoming the inner speech of verbal thought (1986, p. 33). Recent research into self-regulatory and motivational private speech attest to its continuance into adulthood (Alderson-Day & Fernyhough, 2015). What is of particular interest here is what forms this inner speech takes, and how we may listen to it, while listening. ¶ 2

Alderson-Day, B., & Fernyhough, C. (2015). Inner speech: Development, cognitive functions, phenomenology, and neurobiology. Psychological Bulletin, 141(5), 931–965. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000021

Medical Dictionary (2009). Endophasy. Retrieved May 16, 2022, from https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/endophasy

Medical Dictionary (2009). Inner speech. Retrieved May 16, 2022, from https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/inner+speech

Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and language (newly revised ed., A. Kozulin, Ed.; E. Hanfmann & G. Vakar, Trans.). MIT Press.

[It is] a process, a continual movement back and forth from thought to word and from word to thought…thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them. Every thought tends to connect something with something else, to establish a relation between things. (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 218)

Developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky proposes that as egocentric speech becomes internalised, it becomes inner speech, occupying a zone that overlaps both thought and speech (pp. 88–9). He suggests that that there are two syntaxes in operation: the syntax of the spoken word; and a “grammar of thought” (p. 222).

Inner speech is almost entirely predicative because the situation, the subject of thought, is always known to the thinker. Written speech, on the contrary must explain the situation fully in order to be intelligible. The change from maximally compact inner speech to maximally detailed written speech requires what might be called deliberate semantics — deliberate structuring of the web of meaning. (p. 182) (1)The predicate of a sentence is the verb phrase not including the subject. For example in the sentence, “She listens carefully”, she is the subject and listens carefully is the predicate. In this instance the predicate comprises the verb and an adverb, but it may include other grammatical forms associated with the verb that say something about the subject. In some areas of linguistics, however, the predicate is thought to be just the verb.¶ 1

Vygotsky proposes that inner speech operates on the level of a “syntax of word meanings” (p. 222). In order to incorporate the composite nature of thought, which includes imagistic and purely conceptual modes of thinking as well, he suggests that the smallest unit within the system that allows for analysis is “word meaning” (p. 211). A word with no meaning attached is simply a sound, but developing a meaning for a word entails a “generalisation or a concept” that sits within the realm of thought. It is at the point of word meaning that there is a total “union of word and thought” (p. 212). ¶ 2

Vygotsky later changes terminology from word meaning to word sense, drawing on the thoughts of French linguist Frederic Paulhan, who suggested that meaning is but one element within the complex of “sense”. While meaning stays relatively stable, the sense of a word, affected by context, continual development and association, actually shifts and is individualised. Sense becomes a complex concentration and “[t]o unfold it into overt speech, one would need a multitude of words” (p. 247). ¶ 3

The idea of inner speech as predicate has resonances with Salomé Voegelin’s idea that the essence of sound and listening lies in the verb rather than the noun or adjective: “This listening does not recognize; it listens not for what a sound might represent but hears what it might generate. It hears sound as verb, as a world creating predicate” (Voegelin, 2014, p. 83). This discussion of grammar in relation to listening is pursued further in module (iv): Listening Lingua.

Voegelin, S. (2014). Sonic possible worlds: Hearing the continuum of sound. Bloomsbury.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and language (newly revised ed., A. Kozulin, Ed., E. Hanfmann & G. Vakar, Trans.). MIT Press.

Speaking is already its own listening. (Nancy, 2007, p. 34)

When I experience my thoughts I cannot honestly say if I hear them or speak them. Is it my inner ear hearing my thoughts or my inner voice speaking them. Perhaps it is my inner speech’s version of my voice. If I were to analyse my inner voice, it is quiet, calm, perhaps a little higher in pitch than my externalised speaking voice. At the moment, as I write these words, I hear my voice and it is formal, rounded and well-articulated. But when I’m listening to music and engaged in inner speech, the sense of ‘hearing’ my own voice is lessened, becoming more of a realisation of words in a way that sits between concept, image and hearing. ¶ 1

It is perhaps not surprising that when we experience inner speech, there is often a small yet detectable activation of throat and tongue muscles (Hubbard, 2013, p. 222). Oppenheim and Dell (2010, cited in Hubbard, 2013, p. 231) propose that there are two types of inner speech: one that involves sub-articulatory movement, and one that “reflects activation of abstract linguistic representations and emerges before a speaker retrieves articulatory information”. This corresponds with ideas proposed by Vygotsky that there are different levels or depths of inner speech requiring different syntaxes (1986).¶ 2

Reading is a means of listening. (Le Guin, 2004, p. 209)

With both Laurie Anderson and William Burroughs, I heard recorded readings by the authors long before I read any texts. Both artists have very distinctive voices. When I later came to read their works, I read/heard them in their voices. I couldn’t imitate their voices and speech patterns out loud, but I can hear their words in their actual voices. But for me those voices only work with their texts; they cannot be transposed onto another writer. Laboratory tests undertaken by Alexander and Nygaard (2008, cited in Hubbard, 2013, p. 232) have tested the influence of the heard voice on the inner voice. They had participants listen to different texts read by a slow talker and fast talker, with the subsequent silent reading of texts corresponding in terms of speed. So is there an inner ear that works with the inner voice?¶ 3

The notion that there is both an inner ear and an inner voice finds justification in the idea of the phonological loop. This occurs when you repeat a phone number in your head to remember it until you can write it down. The purely heard aspect goes into the “phonological store” but evaporates quickly. If it is rehearsed by a subvocal articulation—“saying” the number in your head—it continues to be reinserted into the phonological store and thus remembered for longer (Hubbard, 2013, p. 227 citing Smith et al., 1995).¶ 4

However, there is still no conclusive evidence that the inner ear and the inner voice are separate. For example, while it would seem natural that voice related muscle and brain activations occur when thinking of verbal imagery, there have also been studies that show that these activations can occur in listening situations that are not related to text and voicing, such as when imagining pitch and timbre (Hubbard, 2013, p. 234). These findings illustrate that it is difficult to establish a clear distinction between the role of an inner voice and an inner ear and that they may work together or apart in different situations. Hubbard’s exhaustive survey concludes with the idea that any distinction between an inner voice (inner speaking) and an inner ear (inner listening) is “heuristic” but not proven and “might reflect differences in content or strategy rather than differences in structure or mechanism” (2013, p. 225). From my own experience, I feel that my inner ear and inner voice (or is it tongue?) are inextricable linked as a kind of conglomerate sonaural organ.¶ 5

Hubbard, T. L. (2013). Auditory imagery contains more than audition. In S. Lacey & R. Lawson (Eds.), Multisensory Imagery, (pp. 221–247). Springer Science+Business Media.

Le Guin, U. (2004). The wave in the mind: Talks and essays on the writer, the reader and the imagination. Shambhala

Nancy, J.-L. (2007). Listening (C. Mandell, Trans.). Fordham University Press.

The intimate relationship of words and sounds that I experience, or have cultivated from an initial predisposition to both, I have begun to think of as a kind of ideasthesia. ¶ 1

Ideasthesia, in its strictest definition is the experience of the stimulation of sense experiences from concepts—what could be understood as sensed ideas. There is a loose association with synaesthesia, which is a cross-modal stimulation from one sense to another: a sound stimulating a colour, a colour stimulating a taste, and so on. The thing with synaesthesia is that this stimulation is not simulated but is actual. For example, a colour-gustatory synaesthete doesn’t just think that yellow might taste like pavlova, they actually taste pavlova on seeing yellow. It is also highly idiosyncratic, so one person’s cross-modal palette is completely different to another. (1)Interestingly, synaesthesias in which an auditory image is stimulated by a non-auditory source are rare; more common is auditory stimuli inducing responses in another sense (Hubbard, 2010, p. 317). ¶ 2

The sense-to-sense definition gets complicated with synaesthesias that involve graphemes (letters) or numbers, as these associations are not really the stimulation of another sense per se but of a concept. Neuroscientist and researcher Danko Nikolić (2016) cites experiments in which an unfamiliar language letter system is presented to a grapheme-colour synaesthete. The new letters don’t trigger the same associations until the correlation of letters to the synasethete’s native language is made: only when the corresponding symbol for ‘A’ is learned in the new language does the new system’s symbol trigger the same colour association. This has led to research into the role that concept generation plays in synaesthetic experience. Nikolić holds that all synaesthesias rely on some level of conceptual association. This intermingling of sense and concept has come to be called ideasthesia. ¶ 3

When I came across the notion of ideasthesia, I perhaps wilfully misinterpreted that it could go either way: senses into concepts, concepts into senses. But synaesthesias in general tend to be unidirectional (Hubbard, 2010, p. 317). Of course, sense experiences becoming concepts is what happens in most acts of cognition, so there’s nothing new in that. And there is no mystery in the fact that words about sounds generate the idea of sounds. So to call my parallel stream of words in response to sound an ideasthesia is overstating things. But there is a certain level of intensive interaction that I experience in which the listening summons the word, which in turn heightens or feeds the listening. Salomé Voegelin describes this as a generative relationship between sound and words:

“[W]e need a language that emerges from listening rather than words that restrict what can be heard. This language needs to be part of the listening practice and share in its generative sensibility to produce words, the material of language, in response to the material of sound, and embrace the possible world of the audible” (Voegelin, 2014, p. 167). ¶ 4

Nikolić proposes that the nature of ideasthesia, in which concepts trigger sensory experiences, is a kind of elementary principle behind the ways in which we respond to art. He proposes the “ideasthesia balance theory”. Entertainment activates the sensorial, with emotional gratification being the privileged outcome, while concepts and meaning with little recourse to engaging the sensorial are the domain of scientific and theoretical activity. The art experience occurs when there is a perfect balance between a conceptual proposition and a sensory affect (2016, p. 43). He suggests that this balance “powerfully affects the semantic structure that we already come with. Such a stimulus not only creates new memories, but makes us re-organize the existing ones. It makes us form new connections—new insights” (p. 44). For me, words about sound and sound about words co-exist in this balanced relationship, so that my sonic art oscillates between the sensible/audible and the conceptual/textual in a way that I propose goes beyond a simple notion of translation of one form by the other. ¶ 5

(1) Interestingly, synaesthesias in which an auditory image is stimulated by a non-auditory source are rare; more common is auditory stimuli inducing responses in another sense (Hubbard, 2010, p. 317).

Nikolić, D. (2016). Ideasthesia and art. In K. Gsöllpointner, R. Schnell, & R. K. Schuler (Eds.), Digital synesthesia: A model for the aesthetics of digital art (pp. 41–52). De Gruyter.

Voegelin, S. (2014). Sonic possible worlds: Hearing the continuum of sound. Bloomsbury.