INTRODUCTION

1. David: (David enters the Faculty and walks towards the Observation lab, Marisol, Mohini & Martina are in the control room, behind the mirror). This film explains research that myself and other members of the Self-regulated Learning Research Group are carrying out here at the Faculty of Education in the University of Cambridge. This project is concerned with the phenomenon of private speech and gestures which are produced by young children when they are faced with a challenging problem or task. Previous research has indicated that this is important in helping children to develop their abilities to think and reason about problems. Our studies, carried out in local nurseries and schools, and in our Observation Laboratory, are intended to explore the ways in which this happens.

SECTION 1: WHAT IS PRIVATE SPEECH?

2. Martina: (sitting in the control room)If someone asks you what is the function of language, you would probably answer that it’s main purpose is to communicate with others. But if you think about it more carefully and start observing people around you and yourself, you would very soon learn that human beings use language to communicate with themselves as well. This is the main focus of our research.

3. We are looking at the phenomenon well known as ‘self-directed’ or ‘private speech’. It is basically speech which is directed to oneself. We all talk to ourselves, ‘in our heads’ and sometimes even out loud. If you think this is not the case in healthy adults as well, just observe students solving a challenging math task. You will notice a lot of whispering and mumbling. Or, if you think of an everyday situation in which you cannot find your keys before leaving the house, you might say quietly “Oh, where are they…?”.

4. But children roughly between 3 and 7 years of age have been observed to talk to themselves out loud much more frequently. When I say between 3 and 7 years of age, I do not mean that private speech simply disappears around the age of 7, it just becomes mostly internalised around that age. First, it becomes quiet and turns into a whisper. Then you get to observe just lips movement and finally you cannot observe it anymore. In other words, in that final stage it becomes ‘inner speech’, which is entirely in the head and not observable.

5. David (sitting in his office): The phenomenon of private speech in young children has always fascinated psychologists. Especially since it is such a peculiar form of language use that is surprisingly present during the daily activity of a child. But it often goes unnoticed, or dismissed as mere babbling. As in any phenomenon in children’s development, there are individual differences, so some children only occasionally speak to themselves or almost never, while others do it quite often. In previous years, some researchers associated higher amounts of private speech with improved performance, while others suggested that such speech was linked to poor performance. However, in recent years, evidence clearly shows that it is the content of private speech that makes a difference to the level of performance, rather than just the amount. The amount of such speech appears to depend mostly on the difficulty of the task, or challenge of the activity. Researchers at Durham University have shown that private speech is most likely to occur while the child is engaged in a challenging task, which is not too difficult, but also not too easy. In other words, each individual child will produce most private speech in activities which are, for them, of an intermediate level of difficulty, presenting a challenge, but one which they can surmount with the aid of private speech. The natural context for an intermediate level of challenge in young children is play, in which, typically, they set their own challenges just at the right level of difficulty. It is for this reason that most of our research is conducted in playful contexts.

6. Mohini: (sitting in the library) You will now see a short video of two boys playing with some LEGO in the Faculty of Education’s Observation Laboratory. One of the boys faces a problem when his train does not seem to run on the train track. You can see him talking both to the experimenter on the side, and to himself, switching back and forth between other-directed and self-directed speech. We differentiate between these two types of speech on the basis on behavioural indicators such as eye gaze, hand gestures and body positions. Also, the content of the speech itself, such as the use of pronouns, responding to the other’s remarks, and other contextual features also help us to distinguish between speech directed to others and speech directed to self.

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SECTION 2: WHY IS PRIVATE SPEECH IMPORTANT?

7. What is so fascinating about such speech? When we are looking at young children’s development and learning, that kind of speech gives us a valuable insight into young children's mental processes. Well, to begin with, it serves as a window into their ‘mind’. You saw the 3-year-old boy playing with a train. In that situation you cannot simply ask him to refer back to what he was doing 15 minutes ago and tell you what was he thinking at that specific moment while he was playing with the train. Even a lot of adults would not be successful in reporting this. The child at this age will not be able to provide you with a detailed self-report and if they try to do it, it is very unlikely they will report everything accurately. We also do not have the technology to ‘record’ the content of children’s inner speech. But, what we can do is to listen to a child carefully while they are engaged in an activity and observe both their verbal as well as their non-verbal behaviour. If you do the same, you might be able to hear the children’s spontaneous utterances directed to themselves, which might tell you what they were thinking at that particular moment. You might be very surprised about the content of such speech.

8. Marisol: (Sitting in the library) However, what still remains an unanswered questions is - Why do children (and adults) talk to themselves? What is the function of such speech? A body of research suggests that private speech is mainly used for the purpose of guiding, directing, control and monitoring our own actions and thoughts. In the literature, these processes are often referred as ‘self-regulation’. Others, on the other hand, argue that such speech is merely an accompanying activity of an internal self-regulatory process, or the ‘visible’ verbal side of it. In other words, they claim that such speech does not make a difference, it is the underlying self-regulatory process that makes the difference, not the speech itself. These precise issues are addressed in our current research.

9. In the last decade or so, a lot of research has pointed out the relationship between self-regulatory behaviour in young children and their academic performance as well as other desirable behavioural outcomes much later in life. It seems as if the development of skills like planning, monitoring one’s actions, or thinking about one’s internal mental processes has a positive effect on different facets of learning across the board.

10. Martina: (Observation lab, contro room) Given the proposed link between the development of such skills and the use of private speech in children, many intervention studies have been carried out in schools that aim to promote self-regulated behaviour in children, by training the children to talk to themselves particularly in the context of problem-solving. However, we can only intervene in a process or improve it when we understand what’s happening there in the first place. So, we think that we need to take a step back and first try to understand what is actually happening when children talk to themselves. When do children use private speech during their daily activities? What do they do when they talk to themselves? What are they actually saying to themselves? How do they vary in their use of such speech? Only after we have answers to some of these questions, can we begin to sketch out the nature of the relationship between children’s private speech and their self-regulatory behaviour.

11. David: (in his office) Our work is aiming to tackle some of these issues. We wish to throw more light on the natural usage of private speech in children in contexts such as constructive, socio-dramatic and symbolic play, where they are faced with spontaneous challenges and are self-motivated to overcome these challenges using the skills available to them. We are using basic DUPLO and LEGO sets for that purpose. Children seem to be very motivated to play with basic sets of bricks. Bricks seem to provide young children with a lot of opportunities for constructive, socio-dramatic and symbolic play. Also, bricks seem to offer a spontaneous challenge during play, and that is what we, as researchers, value most.

12. Mohini (Library): Just to give you a glimpse of the kind of things that we are looking at in a free-play context, you will now see a 4 year old child playing with Duplo bricks from a thematic set of a farmhouse. The constructive play involves various challenges which the child tries to tackle, occasionally speaking in low tones to himself. Such an activity is open-ended in nature in terms of its goal, since there is no fixed solution or way of carrying out such an activity. The goal is not specified from the beginning or pre-determined by the materials used in the activity. Hence the goal remains open-ended, set by the child himself as the activity goes on. In fact, the child constantly sets new challenges for himself within the same activity, thereby constantly requiring high level of self-regulation. Children involved in such open-ended activities have also been shown in previous research to engage in more private talk.

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SECTION 3: WHAT ARE PRIVATE GESTURES?

13. Marisol: (Library) However, spoken language is not the only tool that we use to communicate, to think about problems and to help ourselves solve them. A part of communicative processes takes place non-verbally, by gestures. We all gesture while we talk; in fact, it’s very difficult to avoid doing it, especially when what we are talking about something that involves spatial information. Try to explain to a foreign person in your town how to get to the train station without moving your hands. It’s almost impossible!

14. Similarly to language, that serves a purpose of communicating with others and communicating with oneself, we know that we also use gestures for learning and solving problems. For example, in tasks that require mental rotation of objects, adults spontaneously use their hands as if they were physically rotating the objects, before giving an answer. Moreover, if they are not allowed to gesture during this type of problems, the internalisation of strategies and performance is negatively affected.

15. David: (his office) We also see children gesturing as a way to help themselves when solving problems. In the following example, you will see a child, Thomas, carrying out what is known as the train track task. He has been asked to build a goggle shape according to a plan using bits of a train track.

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16. Thomas is in the process of finishing the construction of a very well formed goggle shape with the pieces of the train track. He is trying to do something very difficult in this task, even for adults: to get the last part of the shape symmetrical to the other half. He is not saying anything, nor can we see lip movements. His private speech is internalised. However, we can still deduct his strategy by looking at what he is doing. He counts the pieces that he has previously placed using pointing gestures, and then proceeds to continue the construction carefully selecting the pieces to get a symmetrical shape, and succeeds! In this example, and in the case of adults, gestures are found accompanying language in the form of overt or internalised private speech.

17. Marisol: (Library) But... What about younger children before they are able to talk? Does this mean that infants and toddlers that can’t talk are not capable of self-regulating their actions, thoughts and emotions? How young do these skills start to develop? Before young children can articulate spoken language, they have various non-verbal means to communicate with others. They use gestures to convey meaning, for example, when they extend their arms to request to be taken on their mother’s arms, when waving bye bye at somebody leaving a room, when pointing at a toy that is out of their reach, or when they shake their heads to say yes. We are currently undertaken exciting studies looking at whether infants and toddlers can also use this type of gestures in a similar way older children use spoken language, to reflect upon problems or difficult situations with others or to communicate with themselves in a self-directed way.

18. Mohini: (Library) Following findings on private speech, we know that children are more likely to use self-regulatory strategies when confronted with a challenging problem solving situation. But how do we propose a difficult task for children than can’t talk? How do we provide instructions? We tend to think that infants and toddlers enjoy exploring the physical world oftextures, colours and shapes of the objects around them, but we don’t tend to think of very young children, before 18 months of age, as active learners and problem solvers. It then becomes a challenging task for us as researchers to devise a situation in which we can observe preverbal children in cognitively challenging situations.

19. Marisol: (Library) (add text, sth like “In collaboration with UAM…” We chose a set of toys that had a common characteristic: they had a goal that young children could understand but that was potentially difficult to achieve. We selected a shape sorter, a hammering toy and a set of houses with doors that have locks and keys. We observed children interacting with these toys with one of their parents. Adults spontaneously produced a variety of gestures when communicating with their children, and when explaining how to use the toys. They showed the objects, demonstrated how to do it, pointed at the right places, and encouraged children to try by themselves.

20. We found that 11 to 18 months old children found these activities engaging and fun, spending a long time focused and persisting in achieving the goals: sorting shapes, hammering, and using keys to open doors. During these episodes we looked at the non-verbal communication between the parents and the children, and especially the gestures children produced in relation to their goals or the difficulties they encountered.

21. Martina (Obs lab, control room): Here is an example of a 15 month old girl, Ana, playing with the hammering toy.

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Ana understands the goal of the game, she is trying to hammer the balls, but she is not hitting them hard enough, so her father gives her a hand by grabbing her wrist and hammering with her. Then she tries to do it by herself, but soon requests the father to provide help by showing her wrist to him and vocalising. The father understands her intention, and helps her again. This may seem as a very simple thing to do, but if you think closely, there are various self-regulatory processes involved, quite complex for a 15 month old. She is persisting in her attempt, instead of just being frustrated and giving up. She is monitoring her action and is aware that her attempt is not being sufficient to achieve the goal: the balls are not falling through. She is also aware that her father can help, so she comes up with a way of communicating precisely the help that she needs.

22. Marisol (Library): What you just saw was a gesture directed to the adult; let’s see now another example in which we can see a self-directed gesture as well as a communicative one. Here is Alex, who is persistently trying to insert a shape in the shape sorter.

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23. We see that he claps and smiles in two occasions after managing to insert the shape. This indicates self-regulation because he is monitoring progress and is aware of his success. First, he smiles and claps by tapping the top of the truck, without looking at the adult, and continues to be focused in the activity. We know that young children are very keen on looking for parent’s approval, but in this case, who is he clapping for? He is clapping at himself, and it seems to be the case, that the gesture doesn’t have a communicative purpose, but a rather reflective function, acknowledging his success, and then proceeding with the activity. In the second opportunity, however, he is clearly sharing the evaluation with the adult, as he turns around vocalising and smiling.

24. Martina (Obs lab, control room): Given the current state of research in this area, what we can say at the moment, especially to all those who are interested in children’s learning, be it parents, teachers or educators, is that private speech is a naturally occurring phenomenon in children’s typical development, and that neither its absence nor its presence necessarily indicates a problem. But do listen to what the children are saying to themselves. You may learn a lot about their internal mental processes through it.

25. David: (his office) For those of us interested in improving the quality of children’s learning through play, the take-home message is the enormous benefit of providing challenging opportunities for young children which stimulate them to display and develop their use of private speech and gestures.