Why Children talk to themselves

Why Children talk to themselves Paper details: read article and please use the attached format form to do assignment. included are powerpoint chapter materials to aid the assignment. ----,~------ Article 11 Why Children Talk to Themselves Although children are often rebuked for talking to themselves out loud, doing so helps them control their behavior and master new skills by Laura E. Berk A s any parent, teacher, sitter or casual observer will notice, young children talk to themselves-sometimes as much or even more than they talk to other people. Depending on the situation, this private speech (as modem psychologists call the behavior) can account for 20 to 60 percent of the remarks a child younger than 10 years makes. Many parents and educators misinterpret this chatter as a sign of disobedience, inattentiveness LAURAE. BERKis currently a professor of psychology and Outstanding University Researcher at Illinois State University. She received her B.A.in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley,and her M.A. and PhD. in educational psychology from the University of Chicago. Berk has been a visiting scholar at Cornell Universit:y, at the University of California, LosAngeles,and at Stanford University, and her research has been funded by the U.s. Officeof Education and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. She is co-editor of Private Speech: From Social Interaction to SelfRegulation and author of two widely distributed textbooks, Child Development and Infants, Children, and Adolescents. She has also written numerous journal articles. or even mental instability. In fact, private speech is an essential part of cognitive development for all children. Recognition of this fact should strongly influence how both normal children and children who have trouble learning are taught. Although private speech has presumably been around as long as language itself, the political climate in Russia in the 1930s, and the authority of a great Western cognitive theorist, prevented psychologists and educators from understanding its significance until only very recently. In Russia more than six decades ago, Lev S. Vygotsky. a prominent psychologist, first documented the importance of private speech. But at that time, the Stalinist regime systematically persecuted many intellectuals, and purges at universities and research institutes were common. In fear, Soviet psychologists turned on one another. Some declared Vygotsky a renegade, and several of his colleagues and students split from his circle. According to the recollections of one of Vygotsky's students, the Communist party scheduled a critical" discussion" in which Vygotsky's ideas would be the major target. But in 1934, before Vygotsky could replicate and extend his preliminary studies or defend his position to the party, he died of tuberculosis. Two years later the Communist party banned his published work. In addition to not knowing about Vygotsky, Western psychologists and educators were convinced by the eminent Swiss theorist Jean Piaget that private speech plays no positive role in normal cognitive development. In the 1920s, even before Vygotsky began his inquiries, Piaget had completed a series of seminal studies in which he carefully recorded the verbalizations of three- to seven-year-olds at the J. J. Rousseau Institute of the University of Geneva. Besides social remarks, Piaget identified three additional types of utterances that were not easily understood or clearly addressed to a listener: the children repeated syllables and sounds playfully, gave soliloquies and delivered what Piaget called collective monologues. Piaget labeled these three types of speech egocentric, expressing his view that they sprang only from immature minds. Young children, he reasoned, engage in egocentric speech because they have difficulty imagining another's perspective. Much of their talk then is talk for themselves and serves little communicative function. Instead it merely accompanies, supplements or reinforces motor activity or takes the form of non sequiturs: one child's verbaIization stimulates speech in another, but the partner is expected nei- 54 From Scientific American, November 1994, pp. 78-83. CI 1994 by laura E. Berk. Reprinted by permission. Varieties of Private Speech Egocentric Communication Remarks directed to another that make no sense David says to Mark, who is sining next to him on irom the listener's nPrsnPrtive. the rut' ~lt broke" without exolainino what or when. fantasy Play A child role-plays and talks to objects or creates Jay snaps, -Out of my way!" to a chair after he sound effects for them. bumos inlo it. Emotional Release Comments nol directed 10 a lislener Ihat ex.press Rachel is sitting at her desk with an anxious look on feelings, or those that seem to be attempts to review her face, repeating to herself, -My mom's sick, my feelin;;s about nast events or thouphts. mom's sick .• Self.Direction A child describes the task at hand and gives Carla. while doing a page in her math book says out himself or herself directions out loud. loud. "Six". Then. counting on her fingers. she continues. "Seven, eight, nine, to. It's 10, ii's 1O. The answer is 10. Reading Aloud A child read written material aloud or sounds USher-lock Holm-lock, Sherlock Holme," Tommy out words. reads. leaving off the final "s" in his second, more successful attemnt. Inaudible Muttering Utterances so quiet that an observer cannot Angela mumbles inaudibly to herself as she works on undersland them. a math problem. ther to listen nor understand. Piaget believed private speech gradually disappears as children become capable of real social interaction. Although several preschool teachers and administrators openly questioned Piaget's ideas, he had the last word until Vygotsky's work reached the West in the 1960s. Three years after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, Nikita S. Khrushchev criticized Stalin's "rule by terror" and announced in its place a policy that encouraged greater intellectual freedom. The 20-year ban on Vygotsky's writings came to an end. In 1962 an English translation of Vygotsky's collection of essays, Thought and Language, appeared in the U.s. Within less than a decade, a team led by Lawrence Kohlberg of Harvard University had compiled provocative evidence in support of Vygotsky's ideas. In the late 1970s some American psychologists were becoming disenchanted with Piaget's theory, and at the same time, a broader range of Vygotsky's writings appeared in English. These conditions, coupled with Kohlberg's results, inspired a flurry of new investigations. Indeed, since the mid-1980s the number of studies done on private speech in the West has increased threefold. Most of these studies, including my own, corroborate Vygotsky's views. In his papers Vygotsky described a strong link between social experience, speech and learning. According to the Russian, the aspects of reality a child is ready to master lie within what he called the zone of proximal (or potential) development. It refers to a range of tasks that the child cannot yet accomplish without guidance from an adult or more skilled peer. When a child discusses a challenging task with a mentor, that individual offers spoken direction and strategies. The child incorporates the language of those dialogues into his or her private speech and then uses it to guide independent efforts. "The most significant moment in the course of intellectual development," Vygotsky wrote, " ... occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge." The direction of development, he argued, is not one in which social communication eventually replaces egocentric utterances, as Piaget had claimed. Instead Vygotsky proposed that early social communication precipitates private speech. He maintained that sodal communication gives rise to all uniquely human, higher cognitive processes. By communicating with mature members of society, children learn to master activities and think in ways that have meaning in their culture. As the child gains mastery over his or her behavior, private speech need not occur in a fully expanded 11. Why Children Talk to Themselves form; the self, after all, is an extremely understanding listener. Consequently, children omit words and phrases that refer to things they already know about a given situation. They state only those aspects that still seem puzzling. Once their cognitive operations become well practiced, children start to "think words" rather than saying them. Gradually, private speech becomes internalized as silent, inner speech-those conscious dialogues we hold with ourselves while thinking and acting. Nevertheless, the need to engage in private speech never disappears. Whenever we encounter unfamiliar or demanding activities in our lives, private speech resurfaces. It is a tool that helps us overcome obstacles and acquire new skills. C umentlY two American research programs, my own and that of Rafael M. Diaz at Stanford University, have sought to confirm and build on Vygotsky's fi)ldings. Our respective efforts began with similar questions: Do all children use private speech? Does it help them guide their actions? And does it originate in social communication? To find out, I chose to observe children in natural settings at school; Diaz selected the laboratory. Ruth A. Garvin, one of my graduate students, and I followed 36 low-income Appalachian five- to 55 2 .:. COGNITION, LANGUAGE, AND 10-year-olds, who attended a mission school in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. We recorded speech in the classroom, on the playground, in the halls and in the lunchroom throughout the day-paying special attention to those remarks not specifically addressed to a listener. Our findings revealed that egocentric speech, Piaget's focus, seldom occurred. Most of the comments we heard either described or served to direct a child's actions, consistent with the assumption that self-guidance is the central function of private speech. Moreover, the children talked to themselves more often when working alone on challenging tasks and also when their teachers were not immediately available to help them. In either case, the children needed to take charge of their own behavior. Furthermore, we found evidence suggesting that private speech develops similarly in all children and that it arises in social experience. The private speech of the Appalachian students changed as they grew older in ways that were much like those patterns Kohlberg had reported a decade and a half earlier. Middle-class children, such as those Kohlberg observed, speak out loud to themselves with increasing frequency between four and six years of age. Then, during elementary school, their private speech takes the form of inaudible muttering. The Appalachian children moved through this same sequence but did so more slowly. At age 10, more than 40 percent of their private speech remained highly audible, whereas Kohlberg's IO-year-olds spoke out loud to themselves less than 7 percent of the time. To explain the difference, we stuelied Appalachian culture and made a striking discovery. Whereas midclle-class parents frequently converse with their children, Appalachian parents do so much less often. Moreover, they usually rely more on gestures than on words. If Vygotsky's theory is correct, that private speech stems from social communication, then this tacilurn home enviLEARNING: Early Cognitive and Physical Development ronment might explain the slow de- ~luming to the classroolJl..- velopment of private speech in Ap- this time, to the laborato!)' palachian children. hODIat Illinois State Unj. While our Appalachian study versily-l embarked on a series of was under way, Diaz and one of his stuelies to test these intriguing passi. graduate students, Mamie H. bilities. My team of observers care. Frauenglass, videotaped 32 three- to fully recorded the private speech and six-year-olds in the laboratory as task-related actions of 75 first to third the youngsters matched pictures graders as they worked alone at their and solved puzzles. Frauenglass desks on math problems. Their teach_ and Diaz also found that private ers considered this work to be appmspeech becomes less audible with priately challenging for each child. age. Yet their results, along with Graduate student Jennifer A. Bivens those of other researchers, posed se- and I then followed the first graders rious challenges to Vygotsky's the- and monitored their behavior as ory. First, many children emitted second and third graders. only a few utterances, and some Every child we observed talked to none at all-seeming proof that pri- himself or herself-{)n average 60 vate speech is not universal. percent of the time. Also, as in preAnother difficulty arose. If pri- vious studies, many children whose vate speech facilitates self-regula- remarks described or otherwise tion, as Vygotsky believed, then it commented on their activity reshould relate to how a child behaves ceived lower scores on homework while working and how well the and achievement tests taken that child performs. Yet in Frauenglass same year. Yet private speech that and Diaz's study, children who used was typical for a particular age premore private speech did worse on dieted gains in math achievement the tasks set before them! Other re- over time. Specifically, first graders searchers had reported weak and who made many self-guiding comsometimes negative associations be- ments out loud or quietly e1idbetter tween private speech and perform- at second-grade math. Likewise, secance as well. and graders who often muttered to Diaz crafted some insightful ex- themselves grasped third-grade planations for these outcomes. Af- math more easily the following year. ter a close look at Vygotsky's Also, the relationship we noted bedefinition of the zone of proximal tween a child's use of private speech development, Diaz concluded that and his or her task-related behavior perhaps the tasks typically given in bolstered Vygotsky's hypothesis that the laboratory were not suitable for self-guieling comments help children evoking private speech in all chil- direct their actions. Children whose dren. Some children may have speech included a great deal of taskbeen so familiar with solving puz- irrelevant wordplay or emotional exzles and matching pictures that the pression often squirmed in their seats cognitive operations they needed or chewed on or tapped their pencils to succeed were already automatic. against their desks. Other children may have found In contrast, children who frethese tasks so difficult that they quently made audible comments could not master them without about their work used more nonverhelp. In either case, self-guiding bal techniques to help them overprivate speech would not be ex- come e1ifficulties, such as counting pected. Furthermore, Diaz rea- on fingers or tracking a line of text soned that since private speech using a pencil. Finally, children who increases when children encounter most often used quiet private speech difficulties, it would often coincide rarely fidgeted and were highly atwith task failure. He suggested tentive. Overall, children who prothat the beneficial impact of pri- gressed most rapiclly from auelible vate speech might be delayed. remarks to inner speech were more 56 11. Why Children Talk to Themselves advanced in their ability to control (J1otor activity and focus attention. The development of private speech and task-related behavior thus went hand in hand. In a later investigation, Sarah T. SpuhL another of my graduate students, and I attempted to witness in the laboratory the dynamic relationship Vygotsky highlighted between private speech and learningnamely, private speech diminishes as performance improves. We added a new dimension to our research as well: an exploration of how the interaction between a child and an adult canfoster self-regulation through private speech. We asked 30 four- and five-yearoldsto assemble Lego pieces into a reproduction of a model. Each subject attempted the exercise in three IS-minute sessions, scheduled no more than two to four days apart. nus timing pennitted us to track their increasing competence. We pretested each child to ensure that the Lego tasks would be sufficiently challenging-something that had not been done before. Only novice Lego builders participated. Two weeks before the sessions began, we videotaped each mother helping her child with activities that required skills similar to those involved in Lego building, such as fitting blocks together and matching their colors and shapes. N ext we evaluated the communication between the mothers and their children as they solved problems together. According to previous research, parenting that is warm and responsive but exerts sufficient control to guide and encourage children to acquire new skills promotes competence. (Psychologists term such parenting authoritative.)In contrast, both authoritarian parenting (little warmth and high control) and pennissive parenting (high warmth and little control) predict learning and adjustment problems. Based on this evidence, we thought that the authoritative style might best capture those features of adult teaching we wished to identify. Our results revealed that children who have authoritative mothers more often used self-guiding private speech. Among the four-year-olds, those experiencing authoritative teaching showed greater improvement in skill over the course of the three Leg-building sessions. Furthermore, we did a special statistical analysis, the outcome of which suggested that private speech mediates the relationship between authoritative parenting and task success-a finding consistent with Vygotsky's assumptions. Unlike previous laboratory research, every child in our sample used private speech. As expected, the children's comments became more internalized over the course of the three sessions as their skill with the Lego blocks increased. And once again, private speech predicted future gains better than it did concurrent task success. In particular, children who used private speech that was appropriate for their ageaudible, self-guiding utterances at age four and inaudible muttering at age five--achieved the greatest gains. N extI turned my attention to children having serious learning and behavior problems. Many psychologists had concluded that elementary school pupils who were inattentive, impulsive or had learning disabilities suffered from deficits in using private speech. To treat these children, researchers had designed and widely implemented training programs aimed at inducing children to talk to themselves. In a typical program, children are asked to mimic a therapist acting out self-guiding private speech while performing a task. Next the therapist demonstrates lip movements only and finally asks the children to verbalize covertly. Despite the intuitive appeal of this training, the approach most often failed. I suspected that the design of these treatments might have been premature. The procedures were not grounded in systematic research on how children having learning and behavior problems use private speech. The spontaneous self-regulatory utterances of such children remained largely uninvestigated. To fill this gap in our knowledge, my graduate student Michael K Potts and I studied 19 six- to 12-year-old boys who had been clinically diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADl-ID), a condition characterized by severe inattentiveness, impulsivity and overactivity. Once again, we observed private speech as the subjects worked on mathematics problems at their desks. We compared these observations to the private speech of 19 normal boys matched in age and verbal ability. Contrary to the assumptions underlying self-instructional training, ADHD boys did not use less private speech. Instead they made substantially more audible, self-guiding remarks than did normal boys. Furthermore, we examined age-related trends and found that the only difference between the two groups was that ADHD boys made the transition from audible speech to more internalized forms at a later age. We uncovered a possible explanation for this developmental lag. Our results implied that ADHD children's severe attention deficit prevented their private speech from gaining efficient control over their behavior. First, only in the least distractible ADHD boys did audible self-guiding speech correlate with improved attention to math assignments. Second, we tracked a subsample of ADHD subjects while they were both taking and not taking stimulant drug medication, the most widely used treatment for the disorder. (Although stimulants do not cure ADHD, a large body of evidence indicates that they boost attention and academic performance in most children who take them.) We found that this medication sharply increased the maturity of private speech in ADHD boys. And only when these children were medicated 57 2 .:. COGNITION, LANGUAGE, AND LEARNING: Early Cognilive and Physical Development did the most mature form of private speech, inaudible muttering. relate to improved self-control. The promising nature of these findings encouraged me to include children having learning disabilities in the research. My colleague Steven Landau joined me in observing 112 third to sixth graders working on math and English exercises at their desks. Half of the children met the Illinois state guidelines for being classified as learning disabled: their academic achievement fell substantially below what would be expected based on their intelligence. The other half served as controls. As in the ADHD study, we found that the chil. dren who had learning clisabilities used more auclible, self-guiding utterances and internalized their private speech at a later age than did children who clid not have a clisability When we looked at a subgroup of learning disabled children who also clisplayed symptoms of ADHD, this trend was even more pronounced. R search on children suffering from persistent learning ifficulties vigorously supports Vygotsky's view of private speech. These children follow the same course of development as do their unaffected age mates, but impairments in their cognitive processing and ability to pay attention make academic tasks more difficult for them. This clifficulty in turn complicates verbal self-regulation. Our findings suggest that training children who have learning and behavior problems to talk to themselves while performing cognitive tasks amounts to no more than invoking a skill they already possess. Furthermore, interventions that push children to move quickly toward silent self-mmmunication may be counterproductive. While concentrating. ADHD and learningclisabled pupils show heightened dependence on auclible private speech in an effort to compensate for their cognitive impairments. How can our current knowledge of private speech guide us in teach- 58 ing children who learn normally and those who have learning and behavior problems? The evidence as a whole indicates that private speech is a problem-solving tool universally available to children who grow up in rich, socially interactive environments. Several interdependent factors-the demands of a task, its social context and individual characteristics of a child-govern the extent and ease with which anyone child uses self-directed speech to guide behavior. The most profitable intervention lies not in viewing private speech as a skill to be trained but rather in creating conclitions that help children use private speech effectively When a child hies new tasks, he or she needs communicative support from an adult who is patient and encouraging and who offers the correct amount of assistance given the child's current skills. For example, when a child does not understand what an activity entails, an adult might first give the child explicit clirections. Once the child realizes how these actions relate to the task's goal, the adult might offer strategies instead. Gradually, adults can withdraw this support as children begin to guide their own initiatives. Too often, inattentive and impulsive children are denied this scaffold for learning. Because of the stressful behaviors they bring to the adultchild relationship, they are frequently targets of commands, reprimands and criticism, all of which keep them from learning how to control their own actions. Finally, parents and teachers need to be aware of the functional value of private speech. We now know that private speech is healthy, adaptive and essential behavior and that some children need to use it more often and for a longer period than others. Still, many adults continue to regard private speech as meaningless, socially unacceptable conducteven as a sign of mental illness. As a result, they often discourage children from talking to themselves. At home, parents can listen to their child's private speech and thus gain insight into his or her plans, goals and difficulties. Likewise, teachers can be mindful of the fact that when pupils use more private speech than is typical for their age, they may need extra support and guidance. Certainly, we have much more to discover about how children solve problems using spontaneous private speech. Nevertheless, Vygotsky's theory has greatly deepened our understanding of this phenomenon. Today it is helping us design more effective teaching methods for all children and treatments for children suffering from learning and behavior problems. One can only regret that earlier generations of psychologists and educators-and those they might have helped-<:iid not have the advantage of Vygotsky's insights. FURTHER READING DEVELOP.lE.'IT OF PRIVATE SPEECH A.IO.'.,;G LO••..-I~cOME ApPAL"'CHIA;-'; CHILDRE:-': Laura E. Berk and Ruth A. Garvin in Devt'lopmental Psychology. Vol. 20, ~o. 2. pages 2il- 286; March 1984. A LONGlTUD[~AL STLDY OF THE DEVELOp. MENT OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHIL. DREN'S PRIVATE SPEECH. 1. A. Bivens and L. E. Berk in Marill.Palmt'r Quartl7/I{, Vol. 36, No.4, pages 443- 463; Oct'abeT 1990. VYGOTSKY: THE M,,:-.: ASO HIS CAL'SE. Guillermo Blanck in v:,l{gotsky and Education: Instructional Implications and Applications of Sociohistorical Psychology. Edited by luis C. Moll. Cambridge University Press, 1990. DEVElOPME:-JT MID FUNCTIO~ALSIG~IFICA:CE OF PRIVATE SPEECH AMONG ATTE.•.•. 'TION.DEFICIT HYrERACTIVIll' DISORDERED A.•.•. TI NOR.1AL BOYS laura E. Berk and Michael K Potts in Journal of Abnormal Child Psychol. ogy, Vol. 19, No.3, pages 357-3i7; June 1991. PRIVATE SPEECH. FROM SOCIAL I:-':TERAC. TION TO SELF-REGULATION, Edited by Rafael M. Diaz and Laura E. Berk. lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992. PRIVATE SPEECH OF LEAR:-JI:-':GDISABLED A:-ID NORMALLY ACHIEVI:-:G CHILDREN I:-.JCLASSROOM ACADE.11C A'T> LABORATORY C01'>.iEXTS Laura E. Berk and Steven Landau in Child DC'1.'dopmC'nt, Vol. 64, NO.2, pages 556-571; April 1993.