Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Is self-directed speech critical to cognitive processessupporting complex, goal-directed behavior? If so, how? Aninfluential developmental hypothesis is that children talk tothemselves to support cognitive control processes, and thatwith age this speech becomes increasingly covert andstrategic. However, while many studies suggest languagesupports cognitive control, evidence that self-directed speechgradually internalizes has been mixed. Moreover, extraneousfactors that could co-vary with self-directed speech, age, andcognitive control, such as talkativeness, have not beensystematically tested. In this cross-sectional study of 86 5- to7-year-old children we measured overt, partially covert, inner,and strategic speech on four cognitive tasks, along with taskperformance and child talkativeness. We did not findconsistent evidence that self-directed speech changes withage; however, we did find consistent associations betweenself-directed speech and talkativeness. Partially covert andstrategic speech predicted performance on one task, and innerspeech was implicated on another. Self-directed speechtended to correlate across tasks, and these correlations heldcontrolling for talkativeness. Taken together, these findingssuggest 5- to 7-year-old children may use different forms ofself-directed speech to support cognitive control, and that theform this speech takes depends in part on factors beyond age,such as the cognitive demands of a task and childcharacteristics like talkativeness.