Private speech on an executive task: relations with task difficulty and task performance

Abstract

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

“…These planning times are markedly shorter than those in Phillips et al (1999), which averaged around 15 seconds in the control condition (planning times are not reported in Fernyhough & Fradley, 2005, Al-Namlah et al, 2006, or Wallace et al, 2009). In addition, unlike in Phillips et al, planning time did not increase with trial difficulty.…”

“…One is that private speech production shows a positive or curvilinear relation with task difficulty, and if this is not taken into account private speech-performance relations can be missed (see Fernyhough & Fradley, 2005;Frauenglass & Diaz, 1985). Even when they are found, the difficulty with a non-experimental design is that it leaves open the question of whether private speech is useful for or merely happens to accompany successful cognitive performance.…”

“…The first to be considered here is a study of the private speech of 5-and 6-year-olds while completing the Tower of London (Fernyhough & Fradley, 2005). The authors found that children producing more private Running head: ROLES OF PRIVATE AND INNER SPEECH IN PLANNING speech completed the task more quickly and accurately than children who produced less.…”

“…Thus there are three studies (Al-Namlah et al, 2006;Fernyhough and Fradley, 2005;Wallace et al, 2009) suggesting a role for self-directed speech in planning, but none used dual task methodology with a dual task control condition. The other study (Phillips et al, 1999) is perhaps the most conclusive of these four investigations in terms of our question of whether self-directed speech is important for planning, suggesting it is not.…”

“…We expected to find a relation between private speech production and interference by articulatory suppression only for problems for which private speech was useful. Like Fernyhough and Fradley (2005), who looked at private speech-performance relations, we expected the utility of private speech to be moderated by task difficulty. For the easiest problems, we expected speech to be mainly fully internalized, meaning that private speech production would be a good indicator of the extent to which performance was reliant on self-directed speech for intermediate and difficult problems only.…”