Читать книгу Lifespan Development - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 387

As Leroy played alone in the corner of the living room, he pretended to drive his toy car up a mountain and said to himself, “It’s a high mountain. Got to push it all the way up. Oh no! Out of gas. Now they will have to stay here.” Young children like Leroy often talk aloud to themselves, with no apparent intent to communicate with others. This self-talk, called private speech, accounts for 20% to 50% of the utterances of children ages 4 to 10 (Berk, 1986). Private speech serves developmental functions. It is thinking, personal speech that guides behavior (Vygotsky & Minick, 1987).

Private speech plays a role in self-regulation, which refers to the ability to control one’s impulses and appropriately direct behavior; this increases during the preschool years (Berk & Garvin, 1984). Children use private speech to plan strategies, solve problems, and regulate themselves so that they can achieve goals. Children are more likely to use private speech while working on challenging tasks and attempting to solve problems, especially when they encounter obstacles or do not have adult supervision (Winsler, Fernyhough, & Montero, 2009). As children grow older, they use private speech more effectively to accomplish tasks. Children who use private speech during a challenging activity are more attentive and involved and show better performance than children who do not (Alarcón-Rubio, Sánchez-Medina, & Prieto-García, 2014). For example, in one study, 4- and 5-year-old children completed a complex multistep planning task over six sessions. Children who used on-task private speech showed dramatic improvements between consecutive sessions (Benigno, Byrd, McNamara, Berg, & Farrar, 2011).

During elementary school, children’s private speech becomes a whisper or a silent moving of the lips (Manfra & Winsler, 2006). Private speech is the child’s thinking and eventually becomes internalized as inner speech, or word-based internal thought, a silent internal dialogue that individuals use every day to regulate and organize behavior (Al-Namlah, Meins, & Fernyhough, 2012).

However, there is some evidence that private speech may not be as private as suggested. That is, private speech often occurs in the presence of others. When children ages 2½ to 5 years completed a challenging task in the presence of an experimenter who sat a few feet behind the child, not interacting, or alone, the children engaged in more private speech in the presence of a listener than they did when alone (McGonigle-Chalmers, Slater, & Smith, 2014). This suggests that private speech may have social value and may not be simply a tool for self-regulation.

Although Vygotsky considered the use of private speech a universal developmental milestone, further research suggests that there are individual differences, with some children using private speech little or not at all (Berk, 1992). Preschool girls tend to use more mature forms of private speech than boys. The same is true of middle-income children as compared with low-income children (Berk, 1986). This pattern corresponds to the children’s relative abilities in language use. Talkative children use more private speech than do quiet children (McGonigle-Chalmers et al., 2014). Bright children tend to use private speech earlier, and children with learning disabilities tend to continue its use later in development (Berk, 1992). One of the educational implications of private speech is that parents and teachers must understand that talking to oneself or inaudible muttering is not misbehavior but, rather, indicates an effort to complete a difficult task or self-regulate behavior.

Finally, young children’s transition from audible private speech to internalization accompanies advances in theory of mind, an awareness of how the mind works, and they are better able to consider other people’s perspectives, which helps them become more effective in communicating their ideas (de Villiers & de Villiers, 2014). Preschoolers who are aware of their own private speech are better at using language to communicate their needs, use more private speech, and display more understanding of deception than those who are less aware of their use of private speech (Manfra & Winsler, 2006).