A Study of Observing Association Between the Production of Private Speech and Several Other Factors Among Children Between 3-5 Years

Abstract

Children between 3-5 ages frequently talk aloud to themselves as they play and explore the environment. This emerges around the age of three, peeks at the age of five and slowly turns to an internalized speech as children grow up. This study was conducted to find out the association between the private speech of children between 3-5 years and eight other biological, social-economic and linguistic characteristics that children share and display. These eight factors are included age, gender, economic status of the family, parents’ educational level, bilingualism, parental responses, existence of an imaginary friend and nature of the activity the child engages in. This qualitative study was done with twenty-four children as participants. Typically developed healthy children from socially and economically diverse families in the same geographic area were selected as the sample. Each child had to face three observational sessions in their natural environment with intervals in between and an interview session. Another structured interview was conducted with parents to collect background data. The audible and inaudible (internalized or partly internalized) private speech reported during the observations as well as the information recorded at interviews, wereconsidered as data. The utterances produced at the observational sessions were videotaped, coded and analysed to identify the influence of eight selected factors on private speech. Results confirmed a significant association between seven out of eight factors with private speech production, other than parents’ educational level. The findings of the study reveal important factors behind psychological and linguistic development of young children and the possibility of improving the quality of private speech by changing one or several factors in the child environment.