Gabriel Bergounioux

Université d’Orléans, Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique (LLG, UMR 7270), France

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Inner speech – what perception?

This paper explores the series of works that were the first to question representations of endophasia in philosophy, in lyric poetry and the fin-de-siècle novel in the 19th century, in the 20th-century human sciences and, more discreetly, in linguistics. It examines the status of inner speech from four angles: should an inner, auditory perception be considered to be of the same nature as an outer perception? Since endophasia does not correspond to any tangible signal, is it a perception or a production of the speaker? To what extent is inner speech accessible to an awareness of its actual presence? Is the representation of perception distinct from perception itself, given that both are linguistic in nature? Moreover, the diversity of terms used to describe the phenomenon shows how difficult it is to define the status of a mode of speech production that takes place without any signal. Inner speech comes to the surface of reflective awareness in interaction and in mental soliloquy; it is also activated in order to recognise the interlocutor’s speech. Confronted with its relationship to ‘thought,’ which focuses attention on content, inner speech is still debated today, as its linguistic dimension stands out from cognitive and mentalist approaches.

Key words: endophasia; inner speech; mental processing of the sound signal