Why Do Children Talk To Themselves? :: Psychology Psychological Papers

Why Do Children Talk To Themselves? Whether you are a parent, teacher, pincer care giver, or a barbarian observer you may have noniced that many children gurgle to themselves. Laura Berk reports that, private expression can account for 20-60 percent of the remarks a child younger than 10 years makes (78). Why do children do this? Does it gather the child as Vygotsky would say, or is it just that the child is making egotist remarks that play no positive subprogram in normal cognitive development as Piaget would claim? I am going to be looking at the differences among Vygotskys and Piagets points of view. Then, I get out look at Laura Berks findings in her article, Why Children Talk to Themselves. I will also talk about other findings concerning this topic. Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky were developmental psychologists interested in the origins and processes of cognitive development. These two psychologists disagreed sharply on the role that private speech played in ones cognitive development. Vygotsky called this private speech while Piaget called it egocentric speech. Piaget observed the activities of three to octad year old kindergarten children, and discovered such uses of speech as verbal repetitions of another individual, monologues during an activity, and non-reciprocal remarks in collective settings. In these instances their speech was not tell towards other individuals. In Piagets mind these patterns of speech showed evidence of egocentrism, a sign of cognitive immaturity, and an inability to share the perspective of another individual. However, he argued, as the children grow older they socialize increasingly more with others, and their speech becomes communicative. Their speech moves away from being self- to other-oriented, a sign that they are suitable to adopt the perspectives of others. A child overcomes egocentrism by beginning to conjecture critically and logically, causing egocentric speech to fade away. Vy gotsky believes that a childs cognitive development originates in socialization activities, and then goes through with(predicate) a process of increasing individuation. He argued that self-directed speech did not show any cognitive immaturity, but did show some kind of development. He claims that private speech represents a functional differentiation in the speech of a child, or that a child begins to differentiate between speech that is directed towards the others and speech that is self-directed.