Inner speech is a pervasive feature of our conscious lives.1 But what is
inner speech, and what happens in unconscious processing that makes
it the conscious experience that it is? A clue to answering this can be
found in cases where the mechanisms that produce inner speaking
behave unusually. In this paper, we suggest an account of a specific
instance of this, namely, a particular subtype of auditory verbal hallucination
(AVH), and draw some lessons about the processes that underlie
normal inner speech.