Semantic Content of Turkish Children’s Private Speech

Abstract

In the present study, the content of private speech that Turkish monolingual children produced was investigated. Data were obtained from 28 children between the ages of 3;1 and 5;7 in three age groups while they were playing with a wooden toy house and its figures. The content categories of Winsler et al. (2003) were used in this study with a slight alteration in one of the categories due to the nature of the data. The results obtained in this study presented both similarities and differences with the existing literature. Children in all age groups produced the highest amount of private speech in Description of the Environment and Task category. There were no private speech utterances in Motivational/Evaluative Statements in children’s private speech. The results suggest that planning, problem solving and self-regulatory functions of private speech are represented in its content. In addition, linguistic and pragmatic features of social speech are observed in the content and language of private speech.

Keywords

• private speech
• planning
• self-regulation
• functions of language