Inner Speech in Schizophrenia

It is hypothesized that impairments in the monitoring of one's own thoughts might result treatment in auditory verbal hallucinations (Simons, Tracy, Sanghera, O'Daly, Gilleen, Dominguez et al., 2010). Using fMRI patients with schizophrenia and healthy control subjects while measuring brain activation during internally generated speech and externally generated speecH. The subjects performed active task based on both internal and external speech as well as a baseline condition. The most important result was the interaction among the groups. It was found that healthy control subjects did activate the same in the left superior temporal cortex during the listening trials. This finding might be suggestive of schizophrenia patients to be unimpaired to sentenses that were spoken. While listening, the comparison subjects did show a larger deactivation during inner speech as compared to listening as compared to the schizophrenia patients. It was concluded that patients have an impairment in self-monitoring concerning inner speech. The unability for diminishing activation this region might be assigned to verbal cues which might then lead to auditory hallucinations (Simons et al., 2010).