Inner speech and sentence processing

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Roxana,

    In some version of a standard theory of psycholinguistics, we are  
not supposed to be talking to ourselves when we listen to other  
people.  The theory holds that we are limited information processors  
and that, if we shift attention away from the incoming speech to our  
own inner voices, we will end up inadequately processing the incoming  
speech from other people.  I can guarantee that this description fits  
my own experiences.  If I get distracted with my own thoughts, I will  
fail to understand what other people are saying.
     Of course, many of us know people who seem to do just that.   
There are some common language expressions for these cases.  Sometimes  
we say that you can "talk, talk, talk, but it all goes in one ear and  
out the other."  Perhaps this is because the other person is not  
listening to us, but to their own inner voice.  And there are people  
who "march to the beat of their own drum" and so on.
    So, are you thinking of this type of behavior when you talk about  
listening to inner speech, instead of focusing on the incoming material?
    If this is what you want to get at, I suppose I would mostly  
direct you to the psychoanalytic literature.  In terms of  
psycholinguistics, I suppose you could demonstrate some of this  
experimentally.  If you can get a group of subjects who are involved  
in some soul-shaking and threatening experience, it may well be the  
case that they will end up with lower scores on something like a  
sentence span test, since their mind will be "elsewhere" processing  
their own hopes and fears, rather than what people are saying.
     If, alternatively, you are imagining that people who listen to  
their own inner voices somehow do a better job of listening to others,  
then that would be still another matter.  I suppose I could imagine  
some cases in which this might occur, but they are certainly more  
difficult to imagine.
    If you want to turn now to the role of inner speech in L2  
acquisition (as opposed to sentence processing), that is another  
matter.  There is indeed a whole book that came out about 12 years ago  
on the topic of L2 and inner speech.  Google Scholar should find it.   
It does a nice job of reviewing the inner speech literature, but in  
the end the major claim I pulled out of it was that, if you want to  
learn a second language, it is a good idea to learn to think in that  
language.  I don't think many of us would deny this.  But this doesn't  
mean that we should think our own different thoughts when other people  
are talking.

Good luck on this topic,


--Brian MacWhinney

On Mar 8, 2008, at 6:53 PM, Roxana wrote:

>
> Hi John,
>
> I am mostly interested in the correlation of egocentric/inner speech
> with sentence comprehension in L1 and/or L2 speakers. I would not mind
> looking at studies (if there are any) involving production as well,
> but I am mainly interested in comprehension.
>
> Roxana
>
>
> >
>


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