%0 Journal Article
%T Is inner speech the basis of auditory verbal hallucination in schizophrenia?
%A Wayne Wu
%J Frontiers in Psychiatry
%D 2014
%I Frontiers Media
%R 10.3389/fpsyt.2014.00075
%X We thank Moseley and Wilkinson (1) for their response to our article (2). Our aim was to contrast mechanisms of auditory verbal hallucination (AVH) to spur experimental work pitting models against each other, and we outlined experimental strategies to do so. While we favor a spontaneous activation model of AVH, different models might be needed to explain the panoply of AVH phenomenology (3). Here, we reconsider self-monitoring approaches that identify inner speech as the substrate of AVH. We agree with Moseley and Wilkinson that inner speech is complex, in part because the term ¡°inner speech¡± covers different phenomena. In a broad sense, it refers to a family of internal experiences of speech including: (1) auditory imagination of one¡¯s own or another¡¯s speech and (2) internal articulation of one¡¯s own thoughts in words (cf. (4); for potential distinctions in neural basis, see e.g. (5)). To clarify our earlier discussion, it was the latter to which we referred with ¡°inner speech¡±, what one could call inner speech in the narrow sense but which we will refer to as internal articulation. The challenge for inner speech theorists is to explain how one or more of these types of inner speech yields AVH. This distinction between imagination and internal articulation bears on the study that Moseley and Wilkinson appeal to (6) which develops a questionnaire for probing the nature of inner speech. They claim that ¡°the presence of other people¡¯s voices is exactly the kind of quality reported in typical inner speech.¡± But is this typical? By far, the largest numbers of respondents (44%) claim that the presence of other people¡¯s voices ¡°certainly does not apply¡± to their inner speech. Indeed, the authors of the study only claim that ¡°25.8% reported some Other People in Inner Speech¡± and of these, only 7.8% claim that it ¡°certainly applies to me¡± with the next strongest statement being that it ¡°possibly applies to me¡± (8.7%). Furthermore, it is plausible that the questionnaire taps into the two different kinds of inner speech we have identified. The questionnaire can be divided into two sets of questions: those formulated with ¡°thinking¡± and ¡°talking" and those formulated with ¡°hearing¡± when asking about other voices (Table 1, (6)). The first set might induce subjects to focus on internal articulation while the second induces them to focus on episodes of auditory imagination in which other voices might typically be experienced. If so, inner speech as auditory imagination might typically be of other voices, but it does not follow that internal articulation is typically
%K auditory hallucinations
%K Schizophrenia
%K inner speech
%K self monitoring
%K spontaneous activation
%U http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyt.2014.00075/full