One of the concerns foreign language teachers may have about using small group (and pair) work is that students will use their shared first language (L1) instead of the target language. This study investigated the effect of learner proficiency pairing and task type on the amount of L1 used by learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in pair…

We present a new analysis of Whitehouse, Maybery, and Durkin's (2006, Experiment 3) data on inner speech in children with autism (CWA). Because inner speech development is thought to depend on linguistically mediated social interaction, we hypothesized that children with both autism and a nonverbal greater than verbal (NV greater than V) skills…

This study compared private speech of children with ADHD and normal controls during problem solving and inhibition tasks. Thirty-two children (16 children with ADHD and 16 matched controls) aged 6-11 years participated. Consistent with previous studies, children with ADHD produced more task-irrelevant and task-relevant external private speech than…

Background: Inner speech has been linked to higher-order cognitive processes including "theory of mind", self-awareness and executive functioning, all of which are impaired in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Individuals with ASD, themselves, report a propensity for visual rather than verbal modes of thinking. This study explored the extent to…

Purpose: Previous findings from event-related brain potentials (ERPs) indicate that adults who stutter (AWS) exhibit processing differences for visually presented linguistic information. This study explores how neural activations for AWS may differ for a linguistic task that does not require preparation for overt articulation or engage the…

The effect of articulatory suppression on second language (L2) visual sentence comprehension and its relation to L2 reading proficiency and lower level processing efficiency were investigated in a series of experiments using 64 college-level Japanese English as a second language learners as participants. The results supported the hypothesis that…

Both Vygotsky, a psychologist, and Halliday, a social linguist, argue for the central role of language in human development. Language is the principal mode of meaning making; it mediates both the communication through which thinking with others is made possible and also the inner speech through which individual thinking is brought under conscious…

In Sociocultural Theory, mediations in second language learning include (1) mediation by others (2) mediation by self (3) and mediation by artifacts, which incorporates brilliant insights for EFL contexts (Lantolf, 2000). Putting these ideas in a task-based method, the present study aimed at examining the contribution of scaffolding and private…

Measures of private speech and task performance were obtained for a sample of 46 5- and 6-year-olds engaged on a mechanical version of the Tower of London (ToL) task. Two different sets of four puzzles of increasing difficulty were attempted on two occasions. In line with Vygotskian predictions, there was a quadratic relation between private…

This qualitative study presents sociolinguistic characteristics of peer-talk of 44 children in a Mandarin-English-speaking preschool in Taiwan where English was taught as a foreign language (EFL). Key findings: teacher-dominated talk influences children's peer-talk; EFL and code-switching emerge in spontaneous peer-talk; children actively engage…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness and preference of the two different types of self-talk (instructional and motivational) on penalty execution skill in goalball and gain insight on the athletes' perceptions concerning self-talk use and its influence on their performance. The sample consisted of six female athletes, aged…

Ninety students at a state university completed questionnaires about use of inner speech dealing with consequential matters, routine matters, and during study. Items were included about media's role in their study environments. Reliable measures were developed for use of inner speech during routine matters, consequential matters, and during study.…

In two studies, 10-year-olds from 2 German special schools as well as typically developing children of the same chronological age (CA controls) or the same mental age (MA controls) were compared on several aspects of working memory functions (i.e., size and input quality of the phonological store, speed and automatic activation of the subvocal…

Studies investigating repetition in SL/FL learners' private speech have focused mainly on its cognitive and metacognitive functions. In the present study, the classroom observations, video-recordings of lessons, audio-recordings of six learners and two teachers and simulated recall interviews were conducted in Japanese language classes over two…

This paper presents a brief research synopsis of social speech, noting that the internalization of social speech plays an important role in the self-regulation of the personality. It then examines the phenomenon of relapse in alcohol addiction from the perspective of psycholinguistic research on inner speech, and suggests that maladaptive patterns…