Individual differences in patterns of attention and thought can vary so greatly that two individuals presented with the same information may encode distinct representations. When presented with a stimulus to be recalled later, the information an individual encodes is dependent on the features of the stimulus to which one attends. Past studies have shown that, on the group level, verbal and visual information (e.g., words and pictures) are encoded in disparate regions of the brain. However, this account conflates external and internal representational formats, and it also neglects individual differences in attention. In this study, we examined neural and cognitive patterns associated with individual differences in attention to verbal representations—both external and internal. We found that the encoded neural representation of semantic content (meaningful words and pictures) varied as a function of individual differences in verbal attention, independent of the stimulus presentation format. Individuals who demonstrated an attentive bias toward words showed similar multivariate BOLD activity patterns within an a priori speech production network when encoding object names as when encoding pictures of objects. This result indicates that these individuals use a common process to encode meaningful words and pictures. These effects were not found for non-semantic stimuli (pronounceable non-words and nonsense pictures). Importantly, as expected, no individual differences in neural representation were found in a separate network of regions known to process semantic content independent of format. These results highlight inter-individual divergence and convergence in internal representations of encoded semantic content.