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Self-Awareness and “Introspective” Private Speech in 6-Year-Old Children

1991; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 68; Issue: 3_suppl Linguagem: Inglês

10.2466/pr0.1991.68.3c.1299

1558-691X

Alain Morin, James Everett,

Child and Animal Learning Development

It has been suggested recently that self-awareness is cognitively mediated by inner speech and that this hypothesis could be tested by using the private speech paradigm. This paper describes a study in which the creation of a state of self-awareness was attempted in children to test the viability of a research strategy based on private speech and used to explore the hypothesis of a link between self-awareness and inner speech, and to test directly this hypothesis by comparing the incidence of private speech in self-aware and control conditions. 32 children were asked to evaluate the attractiveness of pictures when in front of a mirror (a widely used self-focusing stimulus) and with no mirror. Reliably more favorable ratings of the images were predicted presuming intensification of affects in self-awareness. Private speech was recorded, with the prediction of a more important incidence of “introspective” self-verbalizations (for example, “Wow! I really like this picture!”) in the self-aware condition. None of these outcomes were obtained. Results are discussed in terms of previous attempts to manipulate self-awareness in children. It is suggested that the private speech paradigm does not appear to be a promising strategy when inner speech and self-awareness are considered.