Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen.
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Psychol Sci. 2024 Jul;35(7):780-797. doi: 10.1177/09567976241243004. Epub 2024 May 10.
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 ( = 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 ( = 47). Task-switching performance-previously linked to endogenous verbal cueing-and categorical effects on perceptual judgments were unrelated to differences in inner speech.
人们通常认为，内语——即思维以自然语言形式出现的体验——是人类所共有的。然而，最近的证据表明，成年人的内语体验从近乎持续到不存在不等。我们提出了一个术语来形容缺乏内语体验的现象——内语缺失，并报告了四项研究，探讨了其行为后果。我们发现，报告内语水平较低的成年人（n=46）在言语工作记忆任务上的表现较差，在进行押韵判断时比报告内语水平较高的成年人（n=47）更困难。任务转换表现——先前与内源性言语提示有关——以及对知觉判断的类别效应与内语差异无关。
