Studies of the various linguistic parameters in inner speech have so far focused on adult inner speech. Fernyhough (2004) has proposed that adults can move flexibly between inner and overt private speech. Furthermore, there has been a growing recognition that overt self-directed speech (or private speech) continues to have important psychological functions into adulthood ( Duncan and Tarulli, 2009). Although studying inner speech in childhood is fraught with difficulty, there is a consensus that this pattern corresponds to the emergence of fully internalized inner speech as private speech “goes underground” ( Vygotsky, 1987), and the findings suggest that children begin to understand the concept of inner speech in the preschool and middle school years ( Flavell et al., 1993, 1997, 2001 Fernyhough, 2009). In particular, empirical studies have supported Vygotsky’s insight that private speech peaks in the preschool and early school years (between 4 and 7 years of age) and gradually reduces in frequency in middle childhood ( Winsler et al., 2009). Research in the last few decades has largely confirmed Vygotsky’s view of the development and functions of private and inner speech ( Winsler et al., 2009). With further development, these overt dialogues with the self become internalized so that they are entirely covert and inaudible, marking the development of inner speech. In the preschool and early school years, such self-directed speech is mainly overt and audible, constituting a developmental stage known as private speech. In time, words that had previously been used to regulate the behavior of others are “turned back on the self” to regulate the child’s own behavior. Vygotsky argued that infants begin life embedded in social exchanges which, with the emergence of language, become linguistically mediated. The origins of modern interest in inner speech can be traced to the Russian developmental psychologist, Vygotsky, who proposed that it develops through the gradual internalization of linguistic interactions that have been shaped by social interaction. Various domains of scholarship, including philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, have seen renewed interest in inner speech, where it is seen as providing a context for exploring questions about the relationship between language and thought, the boundary between typical and atypical experience, and the emergence and maintenance of self-regulation ( Fernyhough, 2016). It has been suggested to play an important role in psychological processes as diverse as memory, cognition, emotional regulation, auditory verbal hallucinations, and even consciousness and self-reflection ( Alderson-Day and Fernyhough, 2015). Inner speech – the experience of speaking silently in one’s head – is an enigmatic everyday phenomenon.
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