People with “anendophasia” have more difficulty performing certain verbal memory tasks.
- Adults with a very weak inner voice perform worse on a verbal memory task.
- They also have more difficulty making rhyme judgments.
- These people “have probably learned to use other strategies” than repeating the words in their heads to remember them.
Endophasia is a form of human language that is audible only to the speaker. This is why it is called “inner language”. However, not everyone hears a little voice in their head. According to a recent study, published in the journal Psychological Sciencethis is the case for 5 to 10% of the population. “Some say they think in pictures and then translate those pictures into words when they need to say something. Others describe their brain as a computer that works well but doesn’t process thoughts verbally, and that the connection to the speaker and microphone is different from that of other people. And those who say there is something verbal happening in their head usually describe it as words without sound. said Johanne Nedergårdlead author of the work and researcher at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark).
Remembering words in order, an “even more difficult” task in cases of “anendophasia”
As part of the work, the scientists recruited 93 people to determine the behavioral consequences, such as the way these people solve problems, of “anendophasia”. This is the name they proposed to speak of this absence of inner language. For the purposes of the research, participants who reported having a very strong or very weak inner voice in daily life were subjected to an experiment to determine if there was a difference in their ability to remember an item of language and another on their ability to find rhymes. In the first experiment, participants had to remember words in order, that is, words that were similar either phonetically or orthographically, for example “bought”, “caught”, “strained” and “wart”. “. “It’s a difficult task for everyone, but our hypothesis was that it could be even more difficult if you don’t have a little inner voice, because you have to repeat the words in your head to remember them” , explained Johanne Nedergård.
Adults who don’t hear a little voice in their head remember words less well
According to the results, volunteers who did not have a small inner voice remembered words significantly less well. The same observation was made for a task during which people had to determine whether a pair of images contained rhyming words, for example images of a sock and a clock. People with “anendophasia” also had more difficulty switching quickly from one task to another. “They may have learned to use other strategies. For example, some said they typed with their index finger when doing one type of task and with their middle finger when doing another type of task. stain.”