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Abstract

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This work presents an experimental study to contrast the Vygotskian hypothesis on the influence of private speech on task performance, modulated by task difficulty, and its development between 3 and 7 years of age. We employed a method to manipulate private speech, an individual calibration method for establishing task difficulty, and a comparison between different age groups (5, 7 and 9 years). Our results show a significant interaction between use of private speech and task difficulty on the number of self-addressed utterances: only in the free speech condition does the number of utterances adopt an inverted U distribution as a function of task difficulty. When utterance content is considered, the relationship appears only for utterances classified as “task relevant”. Another significant interaction effect appears on task performance. In the free speech condition with medium and high levels of difficulty, private speech makes a significant contribution to task performance. No significant age effects were found either on the number of utterances or on task performance.

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Vygotsky was right. An experimental approach to the relationship between private speech and task performance

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