Private Speech

From Social Interaction To Self-regulation

Rafael M. Diaz, Laura E. Berk, Rafael Diaz

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317783046
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology

Since the publication of Vygotsky's Thought and Language in the United States, a number of North American and European investigators have conducted systematic observations of children's spontaneous private speech, giving substantial support to Vygotsky's major hypotheses — particularly those regarding the social origins of higher psychological functions. However, there still remain many vital questions about the origins, significance, and functions of private speech: How can social and private speech be validly differentiated? What kinds of social interactions promote the use of private speech? What are the sources of individual differences in the use of private speech? This unique volume addresses these and many other important questions. Characterized by a strong emphasis on original data, it reports on systematic observations of spontaneous private speech in children and adults in both laboratory and naturalistic settings. In addition to its systematic analysis of common methodological problems in the field, the book contains the most comprehensive bibliography of the private speech literature currently available.

I

THEORY, METHOD, AND A REVIEW OF RESEARCH

1	Children’s Private Speech: An Overview of Theory and the Status of Research

Laura E. Berk¹

Illinois State University

In the early part of this century, investigators representing three dominant but opposing theoretical persuasions—cognitive-developmental, sociocultural, and behaviorist—took note of a prevalent but puzzling phenomenon among young children: their tendency to talk out loud to themselves as they went about their daily activities. Variously termed egocentric, private, or self-directed speech, empirical research on the developmental significance of these spontaneous utterances was sparse until late 1960s. A rise in interest followed the first English translation of Vygotsky’s (1934/1962) Thought and Language, which granted private speech a formative role in the emergence of uniquely human, higher cognitive processes. In 1979, Zivin’s edited volume, The Development of Self-Regulation Through Private Speech, was published. Included in it was Fuson’s review and appraisal of private speech research, which concluded that the large majority of studies were contrived investigations in which children were asked to adopt the speech of an adult and its impact on behavior was assessed. Prior to 1979, only 17 investigations, 7 of them published, addressed children’s self-generated private speech.

Although the research base has remained relatively small, a two-and-one-half fold increase has occurred in the number of published investigations on children’s spontaneous speech-to-self since 1980. New studies have been fueled by growing interest in Vygotsky’s theory, which, in uniting social and cognitive phenomena, foreshadowed current enthusiasm for research on the social context of cognitive development.

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of theory and research on children’s spontaneous private speech, with emphasis on progress during the past 10 years. It begins with an analysis of the three opposing theoretical persuasions mentioned before. Although the bulk of recent research is framed in Vygotskian terms, the Piagetian viewpoint continues to spark new investigations. Behaviorism has had an enduring impact on interventions aimed at modifying the spontaneous speech of children with learning difficulties and behavior problems; consequently, a special section of this chapter is devoted to a consideration of the assumptions and effectiveness of these cognitive-behavioral therapies. The largest portion of this chapter evaluates evidence that bears on Vygotsky’s theory of private speech—its social origins, its developmental course, and its self-regulating function in facilitating task performance. Despite considerable support for the Vygotskian position, research has highlighted a number of issues that pose serious problems for it. The chapter addresses these concerns, concludes with an assessment of the status of current research, and highlights major unresolved questions in need of investigation.

THE PIAGETIAN-VYGOTSKIAN CONTROVERSY

Piaget and Vygotsky were contemporaries. Both were born in the year 1896, and both addressed the relationship between language and thought in similarly titled volumes in the early part of the 20th century. In The Language and Thought of the Child, Piaget (1923/1962) presented a theoretical analysis of children’s “egocentric speech”—speech either not addressed to another or not expressed in such a way that others could easily comprehend its meaning. In Thought and Language,² Vygotsky (1934/1986) disagreed sharply with Piaget’s conclusion that such speech is egocentric and nonsocial and plays no constructive role in the cognitive life of the child. Instead, Vygotsky regarded private speech as a critical intermediate stage in the transition from external social communication to internal self-direction and as the cornerstone of all higher cognitive processes, including selective attention, voluntary memory, planning, concept formation, and self-reflection.

The Piagetian Perspective

Observing the utterances of kindergarten children at the Rousseau Institute in Geneva, Piaget (1923/1962) identified three types of egocentric speech: (1) repetition, in which the child imitates syllables and sounds or echoes the verbalizations of another individual; (2) monologue, in which the child carries on a verbal soliloquy during an activity or while walking around; and (3) collective monologue, in which the speech of one child seems to stimulate speech in another, but the remarks of the second are not a meaningful and reciprocal response to those of the first. By calling such speech egocentric, Piaget expressed his view that it was a symptom of the young child’s cognitive immaturity. Young children, he interpreted, engage in egocentric speech because they have difficulty imagining the perspectives of others. Therefore, much of their talk does not serve a communicative function. Instead, it provides an outlet for pleasurable soundplay; merely accompanies, supplements, or reinforces sensorimotor activity; or takes the form of a series of nonsequiturs in which one child’s verbalization stimulates speech in another, but the partner is neither expected to listen nor understand. Increasing cognitive maturity and social experiences in which peers challenge the young child’s self-centered perspective gradually cause egocentric speech to decline and be replaced by socialized speech, involving real coordination of viewpoints and exchange of ideas.

Piaget’s conclusions were based on three sets of empirical observations. In the first, daily recordings of the utterances of two 6½-year-old boys were made as they pursued free-play activities in the classroom. Findings revealed that egocentric speech consumed from 43 to 47 percent of the subjects’ spontaneous language. A follow-up study of an entire class of 20 preschoolers focused on the types of interactions in which children engage between 3½ and 7 years. Examination of 63 conversations indicated that collective monologues accounted for 33%, true collaboration for only 3%, while the majority of children’s verbal exchanges fell into an intermediate category in which there was some evidence of social adaptation. Finally, in a third study, Piaget asked 6- and 7-year-olds to retell short stories related to them by an adult or another child. Children rarely took their listener’s perspective into account when conveying the information; pronouns without clear referents, omissions of essential details, and an absence of coherent organization dominated their descriptions. Piaget concluded that egocentrism is the dominant characteristic of children’s intellectual processes prior to 8 years-of-age.

Piaget’s findings were quickly challenged by other investigators, based on their own observations of children. McCarthy (1930) coded the utterances of 1½- to 4½-year-olds while they played in the presence of an attentive adult; less than 5% of children’s remarks were egocentric. Similarly, Isaacs’s (1930) naturalistic records of preschoolers’ classroom verbalizations contained only a handful of collective monologues. In a more recent investigation, Berk and Garvin (1984) observed the speech of 5- to 10-year-old low-income Appalachian schoolchildren. The category of egocentric communication—verbalizations directed at another that were not adapted to the perspective of a listener—was designed to test Piagetian predictions. Although (in accord with Piaget’s theory) egocentric communication declined linearly with age, its incidence was very low to begin with; it accounted for only 2.8% of 5- and 6-year-olds’ private speech and less than 1% of their total speech. Moreover, in contrast to Piagetian expectations, the most socially interactive children displayed the most egocentric communication, suggesting that it merely represented a greater probability for a few faulty utterances to be emitted by children who engage in social exchanges most often.

During the past 2 decades, a large number of studies have questioned Piaget’s account of a highly egocentric, cognitively deficient preschool child. Recent evidence indicates that in everyday conversation, preschoolers are mutually engaged most of the time, and they make subtle adjustments in their utterances that take into account the characteristics and perspectives of their listeners (Anderson, 1984; Garvey & Hogan, 1973; Gelman & Shatz, 1978; Sonnenschein, 1986). Moreover, anecdotal observations by Ramirez (this volume) suggest that when collective monologues do occur in task-oriented contexts (e.g., two children drawing), the verbalizations may be functionally adaptive, serving the purpose of mutual stimulation of self-guiding activity. Nevertheless, an extensive literature on children’s referential communication skills reveals that when a communication task is highly demanding (e.g., having to describe an object that differs in subtle ways from an array of objects or retell a story, as was the case in Piaget’s third investigation), preschoolers are far more likely than their older counterparts to deliver unclear messages (Deutsch & Pechmann, 1982). Moreover, 5- and 6-year-olds tend to egocentrically blame their listeners rather than themselves when a breakdown in communication occurs (Robinson, 1981). Consequently, under certain restricted conditions Piagetian formulations are still alive as attributes of young children’s communicative behavior. Observations of preschoolers’ telephone conversations by Warren and Tate (this volume) lend additional support to this conclusion.

The Vygotskian Perspective

Vygotsky (1934/1986) voiced powerful objections to Piaget’s interpretation of egocentric speech. The direction of development, he argued, is not one in which initially autistic, egocentric utterances are replaced by social communication. Instead, private speech³ has its origins in social speech, from which it differentiates as the two types of utterances take on specialized functions. Social speech remains directed at conversing with others, while private speech becomes “communication with the self” for the purpose of self-guidance and self-direction. According to Vygotsky, private speech operates as an intermediate stage of development between social speech and inner verbal thought, into which it is transformed. Movement from private speech to inner speech—the silent dialogues we carry on with ourselves that are the essence of conscious mental activity—is a matter of internalization of an originally communicative function.

Vygotsky theorized that the capacity of speech to exert control over behavior improves over the preschool years, a developmental achievement marked by its temporally changing relationship with behavior. At first, private speech follows action, occurring as an afterthought. Then speech occurs simultaneously with children’s behavior. During these two phases, it is largely an accompaniment to the child’s activity—“a means of expression and of release of tension” (p. 31). Finally, private speech moves toward the starting point of action and assumes a critical self-regulatory function—planning and modulating behavior on a moment-by-moment basis as the child grapples with challenging tasks.

As mastery over behavior improves, structural changes in private speech occur. Once private speech differentiates from social speech, it need no longer occur in fully expanded linguistic form, since the self is a highly sympathetic and understanding listener. Consequently, private speech abbreviates in a number of ways. First, words and phrases are omitted so that the speech fragments, but not in a random or haphazard fashion. Instead, condensation of self-directed utterances takes the form of deletion of the subject while the predicate is maintained. Vygotsky clarified that this predicative quality of private speech must be understood in a psychological rather than in a grammatical sense, although these two aspects can coincide. Psychological predication is akin to the distinction between topic and comment in conversation; the former is known to the participants, the latter is unknown or not clear. As private speech abbreviates, the child leaves out given or known information and states only those aspects of the situation not yet known or clearly formulated, a process that increases the efficiency of private speech and also accounts for its incomprehensibility to others.

Additional structural peculiarities accompany the transition from communication for others to reasoning for oneself. Symbolic systems are remodeled in individualized ways; for example, several words may be compressed into a single abbreviated expression that denotes the same meaning in a more economical, personalized fashion. Phonetic changes are also evident. The child “begins to ‘think words’ instead of pronouncing them” (Vygotsky, 1934/1986, p. 230), and the audibility of private speech diminishes. At the endpoint of this internalization process—the complete fusion of language with thought—the semantic dimension of speech rises to the forefront while its syntactic and phonological aspects recede. At the same time, internal representations become highly condensed as single words are used idiomatically to stand for a great many words and their associated events and contexts, in much the same way that the title of a well-known book is imbued with the multifaceted meaning of its extended prose. When all of these structural changes are considered together, Vygotsky’s theory predicts an inverted U-shaped course of development for private speech—that is, an increase over the preschool years followed by a decrease, as audible self-directed utterances are abbreviated and internalized.

Vygotsky regarded cognitive development as a socially mediated, not a self-generated maturational process (as it was for Piaget). In Mind and Society, Vygotsky (1930–1935/1978) underscored this idea with his “general genetic law of cultural development” (Wertsch, 1985): “Each function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological)” (p. 57). Cooperative dialogues between children and more expert representatives of their culture were regarded as essential for developmental progress. To be effective, these dialogues must support children’s mastery of developmentally appropriate activities—that is, those that fall within the child’s zone of proximal development, a range of tasks that the child cannot yet handle independently but that can be accomplished with the aid of more skilled partners. As knowledgeable members of society (adults as well as more capable peers) help children accomplish culturally meaningful activities, socially generated tools of thought—semantic knowledge, problem-solving procedures, and metacognitive strategies—are incorporated into children’s private speech and, consequently, into their thinking. Thus, in Vygotsky’s theory, private speech is both the precursor of conscious, self-regulatory thought and a critical link in the cultural transmission of cognitive skills from one generation to the next.

To test aspects of his theory, Vygotsky (1934/1962) performed a number of experiments, the broad outlines of which are presented in Thought and Language. In the first of these, obstacles were introduced into children’s activities (for example, removing paper or pencil at the time the child began to draw) to explore the self-regulatory function of private speech, its role in conscious awareness, and its eventual transformation into verbal thought. When the smooth flow of activity was interrupted, preschoolers’ private speech was nearly twice as great as the incidence reported by Piaget and as that of a control group not exposed to obstacles. Moreover, the content of children’s remarks suggested that they used private speech to comprehend the situation and find a solution: “Where’s the pencil? I need a blue pencil. Never mind, I’ll draw with the red one and wet it with water; it will become dark and look like blue” (p. 30). Unlike younger subjects, school-age children seldom spoke aloud; instead, they paused (as if to think) and immediately redirected their behavior. When asked to describe their thoughts, older children voiced mental operations much like those the preschoolers had verbalized. Vygotsky concluded that by school age, private speech has largely been transformed into soundless inner speech.

In an additional set of investigations, Vygotsky sought to provide evidence for the social origins of private speech by demonstrating its initial lack of differentiation from social communication. Contexts that discouraged social interaction were created, first by introducing noise into the setting and second by replacing familiar classmates with deaf-mutes or children who spoke a foreign tongue (thereby robbing preschoolers of the illusion that their utterances were understood). Under these conditions, private speech declined to zero in the majority of cases. Similarly, when young children were placed with peers who were strangers or isolated at a separate table in the corner of the classroom, speech-for-self dropped precipitously.

Vygotsky’s life was cut short before he could replicate and extend these preliminary studies, and Soviet psychologists did not immediately continue his program of research. In 1936, Vygotsky’s writings were condemned in the Soviet Union as anti-Marxist. Moreover, a prominent group of Vygotsky’s students eventually rejected his view of language as the chief mediator of distinctly human, higher cognitive processes (Kozulin, 1986). Although the work of Luria (1961) preserved Vygotsky’s belief that verbal self-instruction was critical for the eme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Dedication
• Introduction
• PART I: THEORY, METHOD, AND A REVIEW OF RESEARCH
• PART II: SOCIAL ORIGINS AND SELF-REGULATORY FUNCTIONS
• PART III: STRUCTURAL AND LINGUISTIC FEATURES
• PART IV: RECENT EVIDENCE REGARDING PIAGET’S POSITION
• PART V: PRIVATE SPEECH IN ADULTHOOD
• Author Index
• Subject Index