Private Speech and Theory of Mind: Evidence for Developing Interfunctional Relations

By Charles Fernyhough, E. Meins. 2009

37 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As the chapters in this volume testify, Vygotsky's (1930–1935/1978,Vygotsky 1934/1987) ideas about the social origin of higher mental processes are proving influential in a variety of developmental research domains. Our focus in this chapter is on two areas of cognition for which social influences have been claimed, but which have not been linked to any great extent by empirical research: theory of mind (ToM) and private speech (PS). Our contribution to this volume is in three sections. In the first, we examine some possible reasons why ToM and PS might be developmentally related. In the second, we report on three studies that have investigated concurrent relations between self-regulatory PS and ToM in preschoolers and young schoolchildren. In the final section, we attempt to make sense of our findings in terms of different possible theoretical positions on the relation between these variables. We give particular attention to the idea that engaging in self-regulatory PS may provide children with a mechanism for building on their existing social-cognitive understanding, specifically through the opportunities it provides for the internalization of dialogic exchanges with others. DEVELOPMENTAL LINKAGES BETWEEN PRIVATE SPEECH AND THEORY OF MIND The focus of ToM research has recently shifted away from questions about the timetabling of acquisition of this fundamental social-cognitive capacity, toward an attempt to understand individual differences in ToM development in terms of the social and environmental influences that children are exposed to in the preschool years (see Carpendale & Lewis, 2004; Symons, 2004, for recent reviews).

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

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Citations in the corpus

Inner Speech: Development, Cognitive Functions, Phenomenology, and Neurobiology (2015, background): “One relates to the development of verbal mediation of cognition and behavior, and one relates to rehearsal and working memory.”
Individual differences in children's private speech: Consistency across tasks, timepoints, and contexts (2011, background): “Alternatively, we could view lower rates of PS use as indexing more advanced verbal mediation, as, in the age range studied here, children are usually considered to be past the peak of private speech production (Fernyhough & Meins, 2009).”