FWIW, I have no inner monologue, and think I ruminate the same ways I think. It only has verbal content if I am remembering a recent conversation or "simulating" an anticipated one.
That is truly fascinating to me. My rumination takes a verbal form almost all the time… but it is also often related to past or anticipated conversations or interactions.
With no internal monologue, you can still hear words inside your head, but it would be a more conscious effort rather than an automatic, constant process?
I rarely "hear" utterances in my mind, but that may be more aphantasia than the lack of monologue...
For a recollection, auditory aspects might be present for a high stress moment, such as someone emoting a mere word or syllable. It's more like a static vignette with a brief sound clip. It could also be non-verbal sounds.
I don't know exactly how to describe it, but general speech recollection for me is something like a train of AST fragments that I just sort of know/feel. These are some intermediate representation of verbal content, not the serialized phonemes or lexemes, but also not my core thought mode either, which is somehow non-verbal semantics.
I also get this train of AST fragments from reading or from trying to compose text in my head. These verbal units are larger than words, shorter than sentences or paragraphs, and I'm not sure they always align with what you would call grammatical phrases either. This train can have a timing aspect to it which correlates with the remembered or planned cadence of speech, a bit like some cue sheet. Or it could correlate with written structures.
Ironically, I like poetry but have no appreciation for "spoken word". To me, the structure of rhyme and meter is felt almost spatially when I read the page in silence. Hearing it aloud is distracting, not very enjoyable, and also much harder for me to absorb the content. It's as if I don't have enough short-term memory duration to buffer what is being said and assemble the structures I want.
I like music with vocals, but I similarly don't absorb the verbal meaning that much. I like them for the musicality, tone, and emotional content. If I don't read the whole lyric on a page, I might never fully appreciate the verbal content. Weirdly, I can remember lyrics and sing along, even if I haven't read them and fully absorbed them. It's like I have recall cued to the music, but I would not be able to recite those same lines if I wasn't hearing the song to cue me for each little bit.
