Many people report experiencing their thoughts in the form of
natural language, i.e., they experience ‘inner speech’. At
present, there exist few ways of quantifying this tendency,
making it difficult to investigate whether the propensity to
experience verbalize predicts objective cognitive function or
whether it is merely epiphenomenal. We present a new
instrument—The Internal Representation Questionnaire
(IRQ)—for quantifying the subjective format of internal
thoughts. The primary goal of the IRQ is to assess whether
people vary in their stated use of visual and verbal strategies in
their internal representations. Exploratory analyses revealed
four factors: Propensity to form visual images, verbal images,
a general mental manipulation factor, and an orthographic
imagery factor. Here, we describe the properties of the IRQ and
report an initial test of its predictive validity by relating it to a
speeded picture/word verification task involving pictorial,
written, and auditory verbal cues.
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Verbal interference paradigms: A systematic review investigating the role of language in cognition
This paper presents a systematic review of the empirical literature that uses dual-task interference methods for investigating the on-line involvement of language in various cognitive tasks. In these studies, participants perform some primary task X
putatively recruiting linguistic resources while also engaging in a secondary, concurrent task. If performance on the primary task decreases under interference, there is evidence for language involvement in the primary task. We assessed studies (N = 101) reporting at least one experiment with verbal interference and at least one control task (either primary or secondary). We excluded papers with an explicitly clinical, neurological, or developmental focus. The primary tasks identified include categorization, memory, mental arithmetic, motor control, reasoning (verbal and visuospatial), task switching, theory of mind, visual change, and visuospatial integration and wayfinding. Overall, the present review found that internal language is likely to play a facilitative role in memory and categorization when items to be remembered or categorized have readily available labels, when inner speech can act as a form of behavioral self-cuing (inhibitory control, task set reminders, verbal strategy), and when inner speech is plausibly useful as “workspace,” for example, for mental arithmetic. There is less evidence for the role of internal language in cross-modal integration, reasoning relying on a high degree of visual detail or items low on nameability, and theory of mind. We discuss potential pitfalls and suggestions for streamlining and improving the methodology.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2020969
- PAR ID:
- 10348948
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Psychonomic bulletin review
- ISSN:
- 1069-9384
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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It is commonly assumed that inner speech—the experience of thought as occurring in a natural language—is a human universal. Recent evidence, however, suggests that the experience of inner speech in adults varies from near constant to nonexistent. We propose a name for a lack of the experience of inner speech—anendophasia—and report four studies examining some of its behavioral consequences. We found that adults who reported low levels of inner speech ( N = 46) had lower performance on a verbal working memory task and more difficulty performing rhyme judgments compared with adults who reported high levels of inner speech ( N = 47). Task-switching performance—previously linked to endogenous verbal cueing—and categorical effects on perceptual judgments were unrelated to differences in inner speech.
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Do people have dispositions towards visual or verbal thinking styles, i.e., a tendency towards one default representational modality versus the other? The problem in trying to answer this question is that visual/verbal thinking styles are challenging to measure. Subjective, introspective measures are the most common but often show poor reliability and validity; neuroimaging studies can provide objective evidence but are intrusive and resource-intensive. In previous work, we observed that in order for a purely behavioral testing method to be able to objectively evaluate a person’s visual/verbal thinking style, 1) the task must be solvable equally well using either visual or verbal mental representations, and 2) it must offer a secondary behavioral marker, in addition to primary performance measures, that indicates which modality is being used. We collected four such tasks from the psychology literature and conducted a small pilot study with adult participants to see the extent to which visual/verbal thinking styles can be differentiated using an individual’s results on these tasks.more » « less
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Abstract We examined the relationship between metaphor comprehension and verbal analogical reasoning in young adults who were either typically developing (TD) or diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The ASD sample was highly educated and high in verbal ability, and closely matched to a subset of TD participants on age, gender, educational background, and verbal ability. Additional TD participants with a broader range of abilities were also tested. Each participant solved sets of verbal analogies and metaphors in verification formats, allowing measurement of both accuracy and reaction times. Measures of individual differences in vocabulary, verbal working memory, and autistic traits were also obtained. Accuracy for both the verbal analogy and the metaphor task was very similar across the ASD and matched TD groups. However, reaction times on both tasks were longer for the ASD group. Additionally, stronger correlations between verbal analogical reasoning and working memory capacity in the ASD group indicated that processing verbal analogies was more effortful for them. In the case of both groups, accuracy on the metaphor and analogy tasks was correlated. A mediation analysis revealed that after controlling for working memory capacity, the inter‐task correlation could be accounted for by the mediating variable of vocabulary knowledge, suggesting that the primary common mechanisms linking the two tasks involve language skills.
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Searching through memory is mediated by complex interactions between the underlying mental lexicon and the processes that operate on this lexicon. However, these interactions are difficult to study due to the effortless manner in which neurotypical individuals perform cognitive tasks. In this work, we examine these interactions within a sample of prelingually deaf individuals with cochlear implants and normal hearing individuals who were administered the verbal fluency task for the "animals" category. Specifically, we tested how different candidates for underlying mental lexicons and processes account for search behavior within the verbal fluency task across the two groups. The models learned semantic representations from different combinations of textual (word2vec) and speech-based (speech2vec) information. The representations were then combined with process models of memory search based on optimal foraging theory that incorporate different lexical sources for transitions within and between clusters of items produced in the fluency task. Our findings show that semantic, word frequency, and phonological information jointly influence search behavior and highlight the delicate balance of different lexical sources that produces successful search outcomes.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/doi.org/10.3758/s13423-022-02144-7
