Abstract
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 (Sokolov, 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 (Watson, 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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Anderson, R. D. (1982). Speech imagery is not always faster than visual imagery. Memory and Cognition, 10, 371–380.
Baars, B. J., & Motley, M. T. (1976). Spoonerisms as sequencer conflicts: Evidence from artificially elicited spoonerisms. American Journal of Psychology, 83, 467–484.
Baddeley, A. D., Thomson, N., & Buchanan, M. (1975). Word-length and the structure of short-term memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 14, 575–589.
Bock, J. K. (1982). Towards a cognitive psychology of syntax: Information processing contributions to sentence formulation. Psychological Review, 89, 1–47.
Brown, R., & McNeill, D. (1966). The tip of the tongue phenomenon. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 5, 325–337.
Butterworth, B., & Whittaker, S. (1980). Peggy Babcock’s relatives. In G. E. Stelmach & J. Requin (Eds.), Tutorials in motor behavior. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Conrad, R. (1964). Acoustic confusions in immediate memory. British Journal of Psychology, 55, 75–84.
Cutler, A. (1981). The reliability of speech error data. Linguistics, 19, 561–582.
Dell, G. S. (1978). Slips of the mind. In M. Paradis (Ed.), The Fourth LACUS Forum (pp. 69–75). Columbia, SC: Hornbeam Press.
Dell, G. S. (1980). Phonological and lexical encoding in speech production: An analysis of naturally occurring and experimentally elicited slips of the tongue. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto.
Dell, G. S. (1985). Positive feedback in hierarchical connectionist models: Applications to language production. Cognitive Science, 9, 3–23.
Dell, G. S. (1986). A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. Psychological Review, 93, 283–321.
Dell, G. S., & Reich, P. A. (1981). Stages in sentence production: An analysis of speech error data. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 20, 611–629.
Drowatsky, J. N. (1975). Motor learning: Principles and practice. Minneapolis: Burgess.
Ellis, A. W. (1980). Errors in speech and short-term memory: The effects of phonemic similarity and syllable position. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19, 624–634.
Fay, D., & Cutler, A. (1977). Malaproprisms and the structure of the mental lexicon. Linguistic Inquiry, 3, 505–520.
Fitts, P. M., & Posner, M. I. (1967) Human performance. Belmont, CA: Brooks-Cole.
Foss, D. J., & Hakes, D. T. (1978). Psycholinguistics. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Fromkin, V. A. (1971). The non-anomalous nature of anomalous utterances. Language, 41, 27–52.
Garrett, M. G. (1975). The analysis of sentence production. In G. H. Bower (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (pp. 133–177). New York: Academic Press.
Harley, T. (1984). A critique of top-down independent levels models of speech production: Evidence from non-plan-internal speech errors. Cognitive Science, 8, 191–219.
Hinton, G. E., & Sejnowski, T. J. (1983). Optimal perceptual inference. Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Washington, DC, 448-453.
Hockett, C. F. (1967). Where the tongue slips, there slip I. In To Honor Roman Jakobson (pp. 910–936). The Hague: Mouton.
Hotopf, W. H. N. (1980). Slips of the pen. In I. V. Frith (Ed.), Cognitive processes in spelling (pp. 287–307). London: Academic Press.
Jacobson, E. (1930). Electrical measurements of neuromuscular states during mental activities: Imagination of movement involving skeletal muscle. American Journal of Physiology, 91, 567–608.
Kosslyn, S. M. (1980). Image and mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Kupin, J. (1979). Tongue twisters as a source of information about speech production. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Connecticut.
Landauer, T. K. (1962). Rate of implicit speech. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 15, 646.
Lashley, K. S. (1951). The problem of serial order in behavior. In L. A. Jeffress (Ed.), Cerebral mechanisms in behavior (pp. 112–136). New York: Wiley.
MacKay, D. G. (1970). Spoonerisms: The structure of errors in the serial order of speech. Neuropsychologia, 8, 323–350.
MacKay, D. G. (1981). The problem of rehearsal or mental practice. Journal of Motor Behavior, 13, 274–285.
MacKay, D. G. (1982). The problems of flexibility, fluency, and speed-accuracy tradeoff in skilled behavior. Psychological Review, 89, 483–506.
MacKay, D. G. (1987). The organization of perception and action: A theory for language and other cognitive skills. New York: Springer.
Marslen-Wilson, W., & Welsh, A. (1978). Processing interactions and lexical access during spoken word recognition in continuous speech. Cognitive Psychology, 10, 29–63.
Richardson, A. (1965). Mental practice: A review and discussion. The Research Quarterly, 38, 95–107.
Rumelhart, D. E., Hinton, G. E., & Williams, R. J. (1986). Learning internal representations by error propagation. In D. E. Rumelhart & J. L. McClelland (Eds.), Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (1979). Speech errors as evidence for a serial-ordering mechanism in sentence production. In W. E. Cooper & E. C. T. Walker (Eds.), Sentence processing: Psycholinguistic studies presented to Merrill Garrett (pp. 295–342). Hillside, NJ: Erlbaum.
Sokolov, A. N. (1972). Inner speech and thought. New York: Plenum Press.
Stemberger, J. P. (1982). The lexicon in a model of language production. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California—San Diego.
Stemberger, J. P. (1985). An interactive activation model of language production. In A. Ellis (Ed.), Progress in the psychology of language (Vol. 1, pp. 143–186). London: Erlbaum.
Sternberg, S., Monsell, S., Knoll, R. L., & Wright, L. E. (1978). The latency and duration of rapid movement sequences: Comparisons of speech and typing. In G. E. Stelmach (Ed.), Information processing in motor control and learning (pp. 117–152). New York: Academic Press.
Thorndyke, E. L. (1898). Animal intelligence: An experimental study of the associative processes in animals. Psychological Monographs,2(4, Whole No. 8).
Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Watson, J. B. (1919). Psychology from the standpoint of a behaviorist. Philadelphia: Lippin-cott.
Weber, R. J., & Castleman, J. (1970). The time it takes to imagine. Perception and Psychophysics, 8, 165–168.
Wells, R. (1951). Predicting slips of the tongue. Yale Scientific Magazine, 3, 9–30.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dell, G.S., Repka, R.J. (1992). Errors in Inner Speech. In: Baars, B.J. (eds) Experimental Slips and Human Error. Cognition and Language. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1164-3_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1164-3_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4899-1166-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-1164-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive