Inner speech is accompanied by a temporally-precise and content-specific corollary discharge

When we move our articulator organs to produce overt speech, the brain generates a corollary discharge that acts to suppress the neural and perceptual responses to our speech sounds. Recent research suggests that inner speech – the silent production of words in one's mind – is also accompanied by a corollary discharge. Here, we show that this corollary discharge contains information about the temporal and physical properties of inner speech. In two experiments, participants produced an inner phoneme at a precisely-defined moment in time. An audible phoneme was presented 300 ms before, concurrently with, or 300 ms after participants produced the inner phoneme. We found that producing the inner phoneme attenuated the N1 component of the event-related potential – an index of auditory cortex processing – but only when the inner and audible phonemes occurred concurrently and matched on content. If the audible phoneme was presented before or after the production of the inner phoneme, or if the inner phoneme did not match the content of the audible phoneme, there was no attenuation of the N1. These results suggest that inner speech is accompanied by a temporally-precise and content-specific corollary discharge. We conclude that these results support the notion of a functional equivalence between the neural processes that underlie the production of inner and overt speech, and may provide a platform for identifying inner speech abnormalities in disorders in which they have been putatively associated, such as schizophrenia.