Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. In press, Developmental Psychology Verbal Mediation 2 AbstractCross-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-bynationality interactions in the development of verbal mediation. British boys used more self-regulatory PS than British girls, while there was no such difference for the Saudi group. Controlling for age, verbal ability, and social speech, boys used marginally 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 domaingeneral transition toward verbal mediation in early childhood. The question of how language and thought become developmentally intertwined in early childhood has long been of interest to psychologists. Vygotsky (1934Vygotsky ( /1987 proposed that a revolution in cognitive development occurs when children begin to use semiotic systems, primarily natural language, to augment and transform their prelinguistic cognitive capacities. On this account, the phenomenon of private speech (PS)-speech that is not obviously addressed to any interlocutor-represents the process through which language that initially serves a social communicative purpose comes to fulfil a self-regulatory function. Since Berk's (1992) landmark review, which concluded that the evidence largely supports Vygotsky's interpretation of the phenomenon, there has been renewed interest in the self-regulatory functions of PS (Winsler, 2004).Nevertheless, some of the central claims of Vygotsky's theory, such as that PS originates in social interaction and should therefore be influenced by sociocultural variables, have received relatively little attention.In parallel with this growth of interest in the verbal mediation of behavior and cognitive performance, researchers have continued to investigate the development of linguistic mediation in another domain, that of short-term memory. Within the influential model of working memory presented by Baddeley and Hitch (1974;Baddeley, 1986), verbal mediation of memory performance is made possible by the rehearsal of phonological information in the articulatory loop component of the working memorysystem. An important shift in children's strategies for remembering...

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