# From Introspection to Essence- The Auditory Nature of Inner Speech **Opening (not a real abstract):** Inner speech always has an auditory-phonological component. To some this claim is a truism, a platitude of common sense. To others, it is an empirical hypothesis with accumulating support (Loevenbruk et al., this volume). To yet others it is a false dogma (Gauker, 2011, this volume). I defend the claim in this chapter, confining it to adults with ordinary speech and hearing. To those already convinced that inner speech has an auditory-phonological component, I urge caution and patience. For it is one thing to assert that inner speech often, or even typically, has an auditory-phonological component—quite another to propose that it always does. When forced to argue for the stronger point, we stand to make a number of interesting discoveries about inner speech itself and about our means for discriminating it from other psycholinguistic phenomena. Establishing the stronger **Authors:** [[Peter Langland]]