The relation between private speech and cognitive performance

Abstract

Studies of children's private speech have generally failed to find positive relations between children's spontaneous use of private speech ad their task success or performance. This pattern of negative findings has challenged and questioned the validity of Vygotsky's theory regarding the self-regulatory functions of language. In the present study we hypothesize that positive private speech-performance correlations can be found when such relations are: a) stated in terms of specific speech categories and specific performance variables, b) analyzed controlling for task difficulty, and c) assessed on task improvement over time. Thirty preschoolers, ages 3–5, were videotaped while performing classification, block design, and puzzles with distractor tasks at two points in time. Their spontaneous verbalizations during the tasks were transcribed and coded into different categories of self-regulatory private speech. The results show that, when the above methodological constraints are applied, the spontaneous verbalization of labels and descriptions strongly predicts improvement in a classification task over a two-day period. The use of private speech, however, failed to predict other aspects of performance, such as time on task or speed of transition between items.