Séminaire Ladislas NALBORCZYK

The mental production of speech or “inner speech” is a foundational ability in humans, involved in a plethora of activities, such as reading, writing, planning, or remembering. Inner speech is generally accompanied by a subjective multisensory experience featuring most notably auditory percepts (the "inner voice”). But how does it sound (to you) to produce inner speech? Why do humans have inner speech at all? How does it develop in childhood? These are three fundamental yet unsolved questions for inner speech research (i.e., format, functions, and development). Instead of confronting all these questions at once, I will focus on the easiest one (format) and describe some recent experimental and modelling results. More precisely, I will describe the results of a recent TMS study highlighting how different neural mechanisms may provide the sensory content of inner speech. I will also touch on the tricky issue of how activity within the motor system escapes motor execution during inner speech and consider some potential solutions. I will conclude by outlining promising avenues for providing the first building blocks towards a (formal) neurocomputational theory of inner speech able to account for its format, functions, and development.