 Abstract verbal hallucinations in schizophrenic patients may be caused by overly salient inner speech and or deficiencies in self-monitoring processes. These same mechanisms may also lead to verbal hallucination proneness in the general population. In a study of non-clinical participants, those who reported being more prone to verbal hallucinations had greater difficulty distinguishing between high and low-frequency words when they were presented outside the scanner. This was accompanied by increased activation of language and decision making regions of the brain during false recognition of high-frequency words and decreased activation of these regions during correct recognition of low-frequency words. Additionally, this group exhibited less activation of the recollective region of the brain during both false and correct recognition tasks. Taken together, these results suggest that verbal hallucination proneness is related to impaired self-monitoring of inner speech, which leads to difficulties in discerning between similar words. This article was authored by Christian Stefanotto, Christian Nunez, Federica Lombardini and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.