Is there a third option? I don't visualize neither say it to myself. Don't know how I remember it, but I can recall it when I want, storing it in the short term memory.
I think my method is the best, but the supremacy of visualization vs. self talk could be explained by this:
When you talk to yourself you use your phonological loop, which is used to remember pieces of a sentence, while you summon your next conceptual entity and find the corresponding word. I.e. you keep the syntactic and semantic structure of your next phrase intact while you are looking for your next word, which when found, gets in the loop too (this process goes very fast ofcourse. You can understand a word in 300 ms. In this third of a second you distinguish one word from another, place it syntacticly and find the corresponding concept...). However the space in the loop isn't unlimited, it can only hold 8-10 words (depends individually). If the loop is full, you cannot understand language, nor talk in plausible sentences. We once did a experiment (I'm studying Linguistics) to examine the capacity of the phonological loop. Our population had to pronounce the numbers 3,4,5,6,7,8 while they had to determine the plausibility of a sentence projected on a screen. So because of the counting task the loop got full and the understanding of the projected sentence becomes much much harder.
What has this to with BJ? Well, if you use the self-talk method, you loop is full (or almost full) and you cannot communicate freely with the dealer and your ploppie-neighbours to do your act.
gr Jimmy Fortune.