Also known as phonemic hallucination. Both terms are indebted to the Greek noun phoneme, which means voice or sound. In biomedicine, the term phoneme was introduced in or shortly before 1900 by the German neurologist Carl Wer-nicke (1848-1904) to denote a *verbal auditory hallucination (i.e. 'voices'). Wernicke uses the term in opposition to *akoasm, which is a synonym for * nonverbal auditory hallucination.
References
Blom, J.D., Sommer, I.E.C. (2009). Auditory hallucinations. Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology (in press).
Guy, W., Ban, T.A., eds. (1982). The AMDP-system: Manual for the assessment and documentation of Psychopathology. Berlin: Springer.
Wernicke, C. (1900). Grundriss der Psychiatrie. Leipzig: Verlag von Georg Thieme.
Dictionary of Hallucinations. J.D. Blom. 2010.