Background: Many people with aphasia and people without brain
injury talk to themselves in their heads, i.e., have “inner speech.”
Inner speech may be more preserved compared with spoken
speech for some people with aphasia and may serve a variety of
functions (e.g., emotion regulation), which motivates us to provide
a high-fidelity characterization of it. Researchers have used multiple
methods to measure this internal phenomenon in the past, which
we combine here for the first time in a single study.
Aims: We compare performance between individuals with and
without aphasia on inner speech tasks that assess inner speech “inthe-
moment” to general subjective impressions of inner speech to
tease apart the relationship of aphasia severity to inner speech.
Methods and Procedures: Twenty people with mild-moderate
aphasia and twenty neurotypical controls completed several inner
speech tasks, including objective silent rhyme judgements (picture,
written, and auditory), subjective reports of inner speech during
naming, and subjective rating scales about inner speech experience
more generally.
Outcomes and Results: In-the-moment inner speech during silent
rhyming tasks was associated with aphasia severity only for picture
and written rhyming but not auditory rhyming. In-the-moment
inner speech reports during silent naming were not associated
with aphasia severity, nor were the subjective ratings about general
inner speech experience. Individuals with and without aphasia
demonstrated a variety of subjective general inner speech experiences,
demonstrating heterogeneity of this phenomenon more
broadly.
Conclusions: Methods of measuring inner speech complement
each other and speak to different facets of the inner speech phenomenon,
and clinicians and researchers must carefully choose the
method(s) that will provide the information about inner speech that
they desire
