Up to 16 percent of mentally healthy children and teens may hear voices, the researchers note in the British Journal of Psychiatry. While hearing voices can signal a heightened risk of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders in later life, they add, the “great majority” of young people who have these experiences never become mentally ill.

To further investigate how common these “auditory vocal hallucinations” are and whether they are associated with developmental and behavioral factors, the researchers looked at 3,870 Groningen primary schoolers. All were asked whether they had heard “one or more voices that only you and no one else could hear” in the past year.  ~news.yahoo.com