Vygotskyan inner speech and the reading process

There is a paucity of Vygotskian influenced inner speech research in relation to the reading process. Those few studies which have examined Vygotskian inner speech from a reading perspective tend to support the notion that inner speech is an important covert function that is crucial to the reading process and to reading acquisition in general. However, Vygotskian notions on inner speech, in particular, syntactic and semantic aspects of inner speech (e.g., predication, word sense and agglutination), have not been investigated in relation to the study of the decoding aspects of silent reading. In this paper, an argument is presented that Vygotskian inner speech acts in two main ways to process text during silent reading, as a mechanism which condenses chunks of text into compact meaning units and as a subvocal rehearsal mechanism which elicits meanings when reading cognition becomes problematic. In addition to this, a Vygotskian inner speech reading model is also described.