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

By J. Lidstone, E. Meins, Charles Fernyhough. 2010

119 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Cognitive Science & Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Inner Speech: Development, Cognitive Functions, Phenomenology, and Neurobiology (2015, background): “Concerning inner speech specifically, Lidstone, Meins, and Fernyhough (2010) compared Tower of London performance in children under articulatory suppression, foot-tapping, and normal conditions.”
Individual differences in children's private speech: Consistency across tasks, timepoints, and contexts (2011, background): “…designed to encourage participants to make full mental plans (Baker et al., 1996; Boghi et al., 2006; Owen et al., 1995), as previous work indicated that children in this age group spend little time planning unless forced to do so by being prevented from moving the disks (Lidstone et al., 2010).”
Individual differences in children's private speech: the role of imaginary companions. (2013, background): “First, it is common for experimenters to use cognitive tasks to elicit private speech in the classroom or developmental laboratory (e.g., Berk & Landau, 1993; Fernyhough & Fradley, 2005; Lidstone et al., 2010, 2011; Winsler et al., 2003).”
Inner speech is used to mediate short-term memory, but not planning, among intellectually high-functioning adults with autism spectrum disorder (2012, background): “Similarly, Lidstone et al. (2010) found that 7- to 10-year old children completed significantly fewer tower of London puzzles in the minimum number of moves when completing the task under suppression than when completing the task in silence.”
Language and Executive Functions: The Effect of Articulatory Suppression on Executive Functioning in Children (2012, background): “Results again were not unequivocal but possibly pointed to an increasing reliance on speech with growing age: Lidstone, Meins, and Fernyhough (2010) were only able to find a detrimental effect of AS in 9-year-olds when children were told to ‘‘think ahead,’’ whereas Wallace, Silvers, Martin, and…”
Verbal mediation of cognition in children with specific language impairment (2012, methodology): “…the Tower of London designed to encourage participants to make full mental plans (after Baker et al., 1996; Boghi et al., 2006; Owen et al., 1995), as previous work indicated that 7- to 10-year-olds spend little time planning unless they are prevented from moving the disks (Lidstone et al., 2010).”