Inner Speech, Imageless Thought, and Bilinguality
In our book Describing Inner Experience?, Russ Hurlburt suggests that people often overestimate the amount of inner speech (silent speaking to oneself) in their stream of experience. People, he says, simply presuppose that that is how thinking must occur. What the basis of this presupposition might be, Hurlburt doesn't explain, but I suspect our opinions about our minds are often shaped by analogies to media and technology (e.g., computers [or in the old days, clockwork] for minds in general, movies for dreams, pictures for vision). Maybe we can think of language as a medium or technology particularly apt for analogizing to thought.
In conversation Hurlburt has also suggested that one basis for the impression many people have that they frequently or constantly talk silently to themselves is that when we stop to think about what our current stream of experience is, that self-reflective activity tends itself to produce inner speech in many people. Why exactly this should be so I'm not sure. But if it is so, someone might gain the false impression that inner speech is constant because she notices inner speech whenever she stops to think about what her experience is. (This would be a version of the "refrigerator light error".)
Hurlburt goes into considerable detail in our book (in Ch. 11) defending the idea that much conscious thinking takes place neither in speech, nor in images, nor in any other symbolic format. He calls this "unsymbolized thinking" and describes the resistance many people have to this idea. (It is in fact a matter of controversy right now among philosophers such as Charles Siewert, William Robinson, and David Pitt.)
I was then surprised a couple weeks ago, when chatting with a brother in law about his stream of experience, when he casually said -- as though it were the most obvious thing -- that he just had a thought that was quite conscious but neither spoken nor in any imagistic form. When I asked him how he knew that he thought was imageless in this way, he said that it had a specific content but nothing visual, more like words, but actually lacking words, since it was neither in English nor in Hindi.
I was then struck by the following idea: Might bilingual people -- really bilingual people who shift easily and regularly between two languages -- more easily recognize unsymbolized or imageless thought than monolingual people? A monolingual English speaker might experience a thought content and then falsely assume that the thought must have taken place in English. A bilingual person, forced to think about what language the thought transpired in, might in some cases find no basis for choice and so more readily recognize the non-lingustic nature of that thought.
Your thoughts are welcome -- but please translate them into some linguistic format (preferably English) first!