“A thought I can talk to”: dialogical self-regulation through spontaneous inner voice personification in a gifted adolescent
Frontiers in Psychology May 19, 2026 Cora Zeng
A formless, persistent inner dialogue partner called Dialogical Inner Voice Personification (DIVP) emerges spontaneously in childhood, operates through linguistic turn-taking, and is experienced as part of the self. Drawing on eight autoethnographic interview sessions with an AI research assistant and parental accounts, the author—a 14-year-old gifted bilingual student—traces DIVP's phenomenology and development from early childhood to adolescence. Five literatures (inner speech, imaginary companions, Dialogical Self Theory, giftedness and overexcitability, and non-pathological voice-hearing) each explain a component, but none captures the full configuration. A dual-overexcitability mechanism (intellectual × imaginational) is proposed as a candidate explanation, and the clinical risk of misdiagnosis in gifted children reporting such experiences is examined.