Sociocultural influences on the development of verbal mediation: Private speech and phonological recoding in Saudi Arabian and British samples.

Abstract

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The roles of private speech and inner speech in planning during middle childhood: Evidence from a dual task paradigm

“…These findings are consistent with Vygotsky's (1930Vygotsky's ( -1935Vygotsky's ( /19781934/1987 ideas on the role of speech in cognition, and suggest planning can be considered to be largely verbally mediated in middle childhood. The results are consistent with the view that cognition undergoes a domain-general shift towards verbal mediation during early childhood (Al-Namlah et al, 2006;Fernyhough, 2008).…”

“…Experiment 2 showed that, when participants were forced to plan ahead, suppressing selfdirected speech was detrimental to Tower of London performance. The results of Experiment 2 support those of Fernyhough and Fradley (2005), Al-Namlah et al (2006), and Wallace et al (2009) in suggesting that planning is achieved with the aid of self-directed speech. These findings are consistent with Vygotsky's (1930Vygotsky's ( -1935Vygotsky's ( /19781934/1987 ideas on the role of speech in cognition, and suggest planning can be considered to be largely verbally mediated in middle childhood.…”

“…These planning times are markedly shorter than those in Phillips et al (1999), which averaged around 15 seconds in the control condition (planning times are not reported in Fernyhough & Fradley, 2005, Al-Namlah et al, 2006, or Wallace et al, 2009). In addition, unlike in Phillips et al, planning time did not increase with trial difficulty.…”

“…The authors found that children producing more private Running head: ROLES OF PRIVATE AND INNER SPEECH IN PLANNING speech completed the task more quickly and accurately than children who produced less. This was partially replicated by Al-Namlah, Fernyhough, and Meins (2006), who found a negative association between private speech production and the time taken to complete Tower of London problems in their sample of 4-to 8-year-olds. These findings are consistent with the idea that successful planning requires self-directed speech in early childhood.…”

“…Thus there are three studies (Al-Namlah et al, 2006;Fernyhough and Fradley, 2005;Wallace et al, 2009) suggesting a role for self-directed speech in planning, but none used dual task methodology with a dual task control condition. The other study (Phillips et al, 1999) is perhaps the most conclusive of these four investigations in terms of our question of whether self-directed speech is important for planning, suggesting it is not.…”