One child text

• Crib talk


  Pre-sleep monologue made by young children while in bed
• Crib talk


  • Starts around one-and-a-half years and usually ends by about two-and-a-half years, though children can continue longer
  • Consists of conversational discourse with turn-taking, often containing semantically and syntactically coherent question-answer sequences
  • May contain word play and bits of song and nursery rhyme
• Varieties of crib talk

  • Enactment sequences
  • Proto-narrative
  • Problem focused
• Enactment sequences


  Occur most commonly in early monologues, done in a low tone, concerning language to bring about action, occurring when playing with toys and describing ongoing play
• Proto-narrative


  A child creates a story about events that have happened or imagined in temporal causal sequences, can be as short as five words or as long as 150, may include reciting of stories that have been read to them
• Problem focused


  Concern what happened in the past, what will happen in the future and how events are organized, incorporate descriptions used by others to enable prediction
• Functions of crib talk


  • Provides a practice space for developing complex connected discourse
  • Aids a child to use language as a tool to categorize, explain and know the world
  • Clarifies what may originally have been problematic or troublesome
• Crib talk is more complex than that done by children in interactions with others, due to the freedom to control what they say and not have their cognitive abilities stretched by having to work out how to respond to what someone has just said</b>
• Crib talk lacks the self-regulatory instructions of private speech, which usually starts after 3 and ends about 7
• The children studied in crib talk research are atypical in that they are the offspring of researchers or their close colleagues, and so are from highly educated backgrounds
• The child studied by Katherine Nelson was highly precocious in her language abilities, which raises questions about the generality of findings on that one child
• Other studies on crib talk


  • Ruth Hirsch Weir on her son Anthony (1962)
  • Stan Kuczaj on 14 children between 15-30 months (1983)
  • Katherine Nelson on Emily (1989)
• Private speech


  Self-talk children (and adults) may use to guide actions and aid in thinking, considered to be self-directed regulation and communication with the self
• Private speech

  • Can be categorised as overt or covert, and related or unrelated to the task the child is engaged in
  • Children progress from overt speech to covert speech as they mature
  • Has a developmental role contingent on observation of adult speech and practice of linguistic skills through guided participation with adults
• Vygotsky's view on private speech

  Thought is internalized language, private speech is the critical transitional process between speaking with others and thinking for oneself
• Vygotsky's stages of speech development: 1) Social speech, 2) Egocentric speech, 3) Inner speech
• Egocentric speech


  The type of speech found in 3-7 year olds, where children talk to themselves to guide their own behaviour
• Inner speech


  The final stage of speech development, internal, soundless speech used by older children and adults to direct thinking and behaviour
• Halliday's functions of language


  Heuristic function - language used to explore, learn and discover

  Imaginative function - language used to invent dialogues, worlds of fantasy, stories and so on
• Piaget's view on egocentric speech


  Since the child is the centre of the universe, the assumption is that people will understand what is said no matter how it is said, so there is no effort made to tailor the speech for a particular listener
• Types of egocentric speech


  • Echolalia - repeating sounds, words, phrases and/or sentences for the fun of saying it

  Monologues - running discourse, usually occurring when a child is playing

  Social (or Dual) Monologues - two or more children vocalizing in close proximity but not interacting
• Piaget notes that the incidence of egocentric speech slowly dies out between 2 and 7 years as that of social speech increases
• Covert private speech


  Internal dialogue, not spoken out loud
• Overt private speech


  Spoken out loud, can be related or unrelated to the task the child is engaged in
• Functions of private speech

  Can help children regulate their behavior, solve problems, and learn new skills; serves as a bridge between inner thought and outer communication
• Progression of private speech

  Children typically progress from overt to covert private speech as they mature
• Developmental role of private speech

  Contingent on observation of adult speech and practice of linguistic skills through guided participation with adults