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

Lidstone, J.S.M.; Meins, E.; Fernyhough, C.

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


Authors

J.S.M. Lidstone

E. Meins



Abstract

Children often talk themselves through their activities, producing private speech that is internalized to form inner speech. This study assessed the effect of articulatory suppression (which suppresses private and inner speech) on Tower of London performance in 7- to 10-year-olds, relative to performance in a control condition with a nonverbal secondary task. Experiment 1 showed no effect of articulatory suppression on performance with the standard Tower of London procedure; we interpret this in terms of a lack of planning in our sample. Experiment 2 used a modified procedure in which participants were forced to plan ahead. Performance in the articulatory suppression condition was lower than that in the control condition, consistent with a role for self-directed (private and inner) speech in planning. On problems of intermediate difficulty, participants producing more private speech in the control condition showed greater susceptibility to interference from articulatory suppression than their peers, suggesting that articulatory suppression interfered with performance by blocking self-directed (private and inner) speech.

Citation

Lidstone, J., Meins, E., & Fernyhough, C. (2010). The roles of private speech and inner speech in planning during middle childhood: Evidence from a dual task paradigm. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 107(4), 438-451. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2010.06.002

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Dec 1, 2010
Deposit Date May 18, 2010
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
Print ISSN 0022-0965
Electronic ISSN 1096-0457
Publisher Elsevier
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 107
Issue 4
Pages 438-451
DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2010.06.002
Keywords Executive function, Verbal mediation, Tower of London, Tower of Hanoi, Children, Dual task paradigm.

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Accepted Journal Article (471 Kb)
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Copyright Statement
NOTICE: this is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of experimental child psychology.





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