Task-relevant private speech as a function of age and sociability

The intent of the study was to investigate the effects of age and sociability on school children's private speech during independent school assignments. Subjects included 113 public school children in kindergarten through fourth grade. Twenty self-talk utterances were collected from each subject using an experience sampling method (Hormuth, 1986). The utterances were coded as either task relevant or task irrelevant. Data were analyzed using a two-way (Grade Sociability) ANOVA with self-talk utterances as the dependent measure. Results revealed a main effect for the grade level variable, F(4, 98) = 12.08; p <.0001. A linear trend, F(4, 108) = 61.50; p <.0001, was revealed, indicating that as children progressed from kindergarten to fourth grade their task-relevant private speech decreased correspondingly for each grade level.