Getting Vygotskian about theory of mind: Mediation, dialogue, and the development of social understanding

By Charles Fernyhough. 2008

277 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The ideas of Vygotsky [Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech. In The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky, (Vol. 1). New York: Plenum. (Original work published 1934.)] have been increasingly influential in accounting for social–environmental influences on the development of social understanding (SU). In the first part of this article, I examine how Vygotskian ideas have to date been recruited to explanations of the development of SU. Next, I present a model of SU development which draws on two implications of Vygotsky’s ideas: the importance of semiotic mediation for mental functioning, and the dialogic nature of the higher mental functions. I then consider the value of the proposed model in accounting for evidence from three areas of enquiry: the typical development of SU in infancy and early childhood, relations between individual differences in SU and social–environmental variables, and atypical development. The model is suggested to be particularly helpful in understanding the transition from intentional-agent to mental-agent understanding, and the role of language in SU. Remaining challenges include a need to specify further the cognitive processes underlying internalization, and to gather more extensive evidence on the roles of typical and atypical social experience in SU development.

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

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Citations in the corpus

Inner Speech: Development, Cognitive Functions, Phenomenology, and Neurobiology (2015, background): “One implication of Vygotsky’s theory, that inner speech is dialogic in nature, has been proposed to be important in domains such as social understanding (Davis, Meins, & Fernyhough, 2013) and creativity (Fernyhough, 2008, 2009a).”
The roles of private speech and inner speech in planning during middle childhood: evidence from a dual task paradigm. (2010, background): “Error bars indicate 0.5 SD. Experiment 1 References Al-Namlah, A. S., Fernyhough, C., & Meins, E. (2006).”
Brief Report: Inner Speech Impairment in Children with Autism is Associated with Greater Nonverbal than Verbal Skills (2009, unknown): “…participants with both autism and a NV [ V skills profile, we would expect a tendency not to use inner speech to have deleterious effects on functioning in the real world, most notably for executive functioning (Baddeley et al. 2001; Baldo et al. 2005) and social understanding (Fernyhough 2008).”
Verbal Mediation of Problem Solving in Pre-Primary and Junior Primary School Children (2012, background): “In the socio-cultural approach, which was founded by the work of the prominent Russian scholar, Lev Vygotsky, mediation is conceptualised as the major determinant of human development (Karpov, 2005) and is seen as a central explanatory construct (Cole & Engestrom, 2007; Fernyhough, 2008; Valsiner, 2”
The interactive brain hypothesis (2012, background): “, 1956; Bateson, 1972; Brüne, 2003; Burns, 2006) and autism (Hobson, 2002), and the role of language and dialogical processes (including implications for cognitive functions, such as planning and formal reasoning) (Garfield et al., 2001; Carpendale and Lewis, 2004; Symons, 2004; Fernyhough, 2008).”
Brief Report: Predicting Inner Speech Use Amongst Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): The Roles of Verbal Ability and Cognitive Profile (2010, background): “In our view, there are strong theoretical reasons to expect inner speech use to be atypical in ASD ( Fernyhough 2008 ), and some empirical studies have indicated that this is the case.”
Inner speech is used to mediate short-term memory, but not planning, among intellectually high-functioning adults with autism spectrum disorder (2012, methodology): “From a Vygotskian perspective, then, individuals with ASD would be expected to show a diminished tendency to employ inner speech as a primary means of thinking (Fernyhough, 1996, 2008).”
The varieties of inner speech: links between quality of inner speech and psychopathological variables in a sample of young adults. (2011, background): “The gradual internalization of these social exchanges (Wertsch, 1980) guarantees that inner speech has an inherently dialogic nature, in the sense of an ongoing interplay between different internalized perspectives (Fernyhough, 1996; Fernyhough, 2008).”
The brain’s conversation with itself: neural substrates of dialogic inner speech (2015, background): “The direction of this relationship remains to be explored: on the one hand, problems with ToM could cause a qualitatively different experience of inner speech in autism; on the other hand, a lack of conversational or communicative inner speech might impact ToM development through limiting opportunit”