Geva Inner Speech Battery

The battery probes inner speech, the silent use of language in the mind, through tasks that require generating and judging a word’s sound without speaking, such as deciding whether two written words rhyme or sound the same. Inner speech draws on the brain’s speech-planning and speech-perception systems, in particular the left inferior frontal gyrus and the supramarginal gyrus. It is also one of the signals studied in brain-computer interfaces that aim to restore communication.

The result characterizes a person’s inner speech. In aphasia, inner speech and spoken speech can come apart in either direction, so the battery adds information that a test of speaking alone does not. It is reference information, and in research settings it informs work on inner-speech-based communication.

• Aphasia→

Created by Geva and Warburton, who published the test battery in 2019, building on earlier work mapping inner speech in people with aphasia.

Psychometrics

Normative data

Published norms (Geva & Warburton, 2019)

Standardisation

Standardised tasks and scoring

References

1. 1.Geva S, Warburton EA. A test battery for inner speech functions. Arch Clin Neuropsychol. 2019;34(1):97-113. DOI 10.1093/arclin/acy018.
2. 2.Geva S, Jones PS, Crinion JT, Price CJ, Baron JC, Warburton EA. The neural correlates of inner speech defined by voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. Brain. 2011;134(10):3071-3082. DOI 10.1093/brain/awr232.
3. 3.Langland-Hassan P, Faries FR, Richardson MJ, Dietz A. Inner speech deficits in people with aphasia. Front Psychol. 2015;6:528. PMID 25999876.
4. 4.Kunz EM, et al. Inner speech in motor cortex and implications for speech neuroprostheses. Cell. 2025;188(17):4658-4673. PMID 40816265.
5. 5.Fama ME, Turkeltaub PE. Inner speech in aphasia: current evidence, clinical implications, and future directions. Am J Speech Lang Pathol. 2019;29(1S):560-573. PMID 31518502.