“Errors in Inner Speech”, 1992 (; similar):
Many people have the feeling that they can hear a little voice inside their heads. This inner speech accompanies reading and writing and often co-occurs with activities that involve mental planning such as problem solving (1972). Clearly, inner speech is ubiquitous in our mental lives, and so it is not surprising that it has played a large role in psychological theory. For example, it has been proposed that inner speech is a necessary accompaniment to thought and even that inner speech is to be identified with thought (1919). Although these radical views of the relation between inner speech and thought are held by few, if any, psychologists today, there is, nonetheless, widespread assent that the voice in the head is important.
In this chapter, we investigate the properties of inner speech in a somewhat unusual way, by looking at the “tongue” slips that seem to occur in it. The first experiment compared inner slips that subjects reported “hearing” when imagining tongue twisters with the overt slips that a different group of subjects made when saying the same stimuli aloud. The second experiment extended this comparison to practice effects. The subjects either mentally or overtly practiced saying tongue twisters, and the effect of this practice on the frequency of slips in both inner and overt speech was assessed. By way of introduction to our experiments, we first provide some background on inner speech and then discuss the theory and data concerned with speech errors.
…We further showed that this abbreviated character of inner speech diminishes its effectiveness for practicing phonologically confusing phrases. Feedback regarding potential slips is seen to be deficient in inner speech relative to overt speech, and thus, inner practice does not help prevent slips in the overt repetition of such phrases.
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