Rethinking private speech in preschoolers: the effects of social presence

Private speech utterances (PS) from 24 preschool children and 24 adults were obtained under (noninteracting) listener present and listener absent conditions using 2 tasks with an identical structure. Children produced significantly more PS in the listener present condition. Similar results were obtained with adults, albeit with a reduced incidence of private speech. The children's PS was further subdivided into 4 main categories: task irrelevant, task relevant general, task relevant focused, and incoherent mutterings. The last 2 of these categories accounted for 75% of PS in the absent condition, offering a more conservative coding of speech that could be regarded truly "private," i.e., only for "self." This subset of utterances, however, was still significantly more prevalent in the listener present condition. The results are interpreted as showing a social motive in talking out loud during problem solving and are considered in terms of a reappraisal of what is implied by the term "private speech."