“A thought I can talk to”: dialogical self-regulation through spontaneous inner voice personification in a gifted adolescent

This paper introduces Dialogical Inner Voice Personification (DIVP): a formless, persistent inner dialogue partner that emerges spontaneously in childhood, operates through linguistic turn-taking, and is experienced as part of the self. Drawing on eight autoethnographic interview sessions conducted with an AI research assistant and corroborated by parental accounts, the author — a 14-year-old gifted bilingual student (CAT4 Non-verbal SAS 131, 98th percentile; Spatial SAS 139, 99th percentile) —