Part 2. Internal speech as a special type of speech activity

The problem of inner speech is not yet sufficiently studied in psycholinguistics, both theoretically and experimentally. Meanwhile, without a proper understanding of the psychological nature of inner speech, "there can be no way to figure out the relationship of thought to a word in their real complexity" (LS Vygotsky [45, p. 314]).

The great ancient Greek philosopher Plato defined thinking as verbally expressed silent speech, emphasizing the importance of inner speech for thinking and, possibly, in fact identifying these concepts. The famous linguist of the XIX century M. Muller in some of his works quite categorically argued that speech and thinking are identical, unambiguous concepts. In the future, this view was supported by American behaviorism, which was reflected in the formula: thinking is a silent speech “speech minus sound”. Representatives of the Würzburg Psychological School (K. Buhler, O. Külpe and others) defended the opposite point of view on the interrelation of the processes of thinking and speech. They declared the complete independence of thought from the word and language in general. They also rejected the need for thinking of inner speech, that is, speech, as defined by K. Buhler, in the form of “optical, acoustic or motor representations of words” (35).

The problem of inner speech was also investigated in connection with the study of verbal memory. Thus, some French psychologists, illegally reducing intra-speech processes to memory processes, tried to establish in which images of memory — acoustic, optical, motor, or synthetic — that is the memory of words.

A number of researchers in the 19th and early 20th centuries interpreted the processes of internal speech as an alternative to reducing the usual speech act. So, V.M. Bekhterev defined the internal speech as not revealed in the motor part of the speech reflex. [137] THEM. Sechenov believed that it was a reflex, torn off on two thirds of its path. [138] Many researchers viewed internal speech only as a process of “internal speaking,” that is, as “soundless” external speech ”(224). Thus, the term-concept "internal speech" was used in the scientific speech-speaking literature to designate the most diverse in nature processes that do not exhaust this concept, and sometimes do not coincide with it.