Objective support for subjective reports of successful inner speech in two people with aphasia

ABSTRACT

People with aphasia frequently report being able to say a word correctly in their heads, even if they are unable to say that word aloud. It is difficult to know what is meant by these reports of “successful inner speech”. We probe the experience of successful inner speech in two people with aphasia. We show that these reports are associated with correct overt speech and phonologically related nonword errors, that they relate to word characteristics associated with ease of lexical access but not ease of production, and that they predict whether or not individual words are relearned during anomia treatment. These findings suggest that reports of successful inner speech are meaningful and may be useful to study self-monitoring in aphasia, to better understand anomia, and to predict treatment outcomes. Ultimately, the study of inner speech in people with aphasia could provide critical insights that inform our understanding of normal language.

KEYWORDS:

• stroke
• aphasia
• language
• inner speech
• anomia

Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely thank our study participants for their time and patience. We thank Lisa Clark and Ethan Beaman for their help with IPA transcriptions, and Mackenzie Fama for her assistance with error coding and in discussion about inner speech. We also thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

William Hayward http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9344-4203

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by NIH/NIDCD [grant number F30DC014198], [grant number R03DC014310]; by NIH/NCATS via the Georgetown-Howard Universities Center for Clinical and Translational Science [grant KL2TR000102]; by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation [grant number 2012062]; and by the Vernon Family Trust. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.