Sociocultural influences on the development of verbal mediation: Private speech and phonological recoding in Saudi Arabian and British samples.

By Abdulrahman S. Al-Namlah, Charles Fernyhough, E. Meins. 2006

97 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cross-national stability in private speech (PS) and short-term memory was investigated in Saudi Arabian (n = 63) and British (n = 58) 4- to 8-year-olds. Assumed differences in child-adult interaction between the 2 nationality groups led to predictions of Gender x Nationality interactions in the development of verbal mediation. British boys used more self-regulatory PS than British girls, whereas there was no such difference for the Saudi group. When age, verbal ability, and social speech were controlled, boys used slightly more self-regulatory PS than girls. Self-regulatory PS was related to children's use of phonological recoding of visually presented material in a short-term memory task, suggesting that PS and phonological recoding represent different facets of a domain-general transition toward verbal mediation in early childhood.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Language and Linguistics, Cognitive Science & Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Inner Speech: Development, Cognitive Functions, Phenomenology, and Neurobiology (2015, background): “To date, there have been few attempts to integrate the Vygotskian and working memory approaches to inner speech (although see Al-Namlah et al., 2006).”
Inner speech is used to mediate short-term memory, but not planning, among intellectually high-functioning adults with autism spectrum disorder (2012, methodology): “This idea has been stated explicitly by several contemporary Vygotskian theorists (e.g., Fernyhough, 1996; Al-Namlah et al., 2006) and has received support from studies that have shown higher order executive functions, such as planning and task switching, to be verbally mediated from this age onward”
The roles of private speech and inner speech in planning during middle childhood: evidence from a dual task paradigm. (2010, background): “The results of Experiment 2 support those of Fernyhough and Fradley (2005), Al-Namlah et al. (2006), and Wallace et al.”
Individual differences in children's private speech: the role of imaginary companions. (2013, methodology): “…ability was assessed using the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS; Dunn, Dunn, Whetton, & Burley, 1997) to control for verbal ability given its previously observed positive association with having an imaginary companion (Taylor & Carlson, 1997) and with private speech (Al-Namlah et al., 2006).”
Phonological, visual, and semantic coding strategies and children's short-term picture memory span (2012, background): “Al-Namlah, Fernyhough, and Meins (2006) argued that both skills underpin the important developmental transition to verbal mediation in the early school years, and Winsler and Naglieri (2003) provided an in-depth account of the development of “private speech” and problem-solving strategies in…”
Private Speech in Illiterate Adults: Cognitive Functions, Task Difficulty, and Literacy (2013, background): “In Al-Namlah et al. (2006), for instance, PS was observed across British and Saudi Arabian children, and there were no overall differences due to nationality in use of self-talk.”
Getting Vygotskian about theory of mind: Mediation, dialogue, and the development of social understanding (2008, unknown): “Evidence for a domain-general shift towards verbal mediation has been presented by Al-Namlah, Fernyhough, and Meins (2006), who reported that children‘s use of self-regulatory private speech accounted for a significant amount of the variance in their use of phonological recoding of visually…”
Brief Report: Inner Speech Impairment in Children with Autism is Associated with Greater Nonverbal than Verbal Skills (2009, unknown): “The present findings are therefore in line with evidence from studies on typically developing children that relatively impoverished social interaction and verbal abilities can affect the development of verbal mediation (e.g., Al-Namlah et al. 2006 ).”
Brief Report: Predicting Inner Speech Use Amongst Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): The Roles of Verbal Ability and Cognitive Profile (2010, background): “Amongst typically developing children, the use of inner speech for the purposes of shortterm memory is strongly predicted by verbal ability and is also highly associated with the use of verbal mediation for executive planning ( Al-Namlah et al. 2006 ).”
Individual differences in children's private speech: Consistency across tasks, timepoints, and contexts (2011, background): “The present findings are the first relating PS production on a memory task (digit span) to PS production on problem-solving and executive-function tasks (but see also Al-Namlah et al., 2006).”