The sound of silence: on inner speech and the architecture of the language faculty

When is sound paired with meaning during language production? The exploration of inner speech offers a unique opportunity to approach this fundamental question, allowing a general reflection on the architecture of human language structure and its evolution. Recent experiments based on awake surgery techniques show that during language production the code exploited by neurons contains acoustic information even in non-acoustic areas such as Broca’s area and even during inner speech, that is without externalization. This result implies that inner speech cannot per se allow decoupling of acoustic and syntactic information. In the last part of the paper it will be shown how this can be obtained in a different manner by analysing the brain reaction to homophonous phrases with stereoelectroencephalography and evaluate the results with different statistical models.