The role of inner speech on the association between childhood adversity and 'hearing voices'.

•In psychosis, increased childhood adversity and dialogic inner speech are associated with abuse and dysfunction scores.•Significant total effect of childhood adversity was found in both auditory verbal hallucination and delusions.•Childhood adversity, inner speech and psychosis are partially influenced by dialogic inner speech.•Inner dialogic speech could be a specific mechanism through which childhood adversity leads to greater severity of auditory verbal hallucinations.