Preschool Children'S Private Speech Content And Performance On Executive Functioning And Problem-Solving Tasks

Emerging in the preschool years, private speech provides a regulatory tool to support task performance. Here, we investigate the presence and nature of regulatory private speech content subtypes and their relationship to task performance in 3- to 5-year-old children. Seventy-one children completed a Duplo construction and an iPad-administered card sort task. Intelligible private speech utterances were coded according to task-relevance and across three regulatory phases - forethought content (planning, analytical and motivational), performance content (selfinstructional, observational and attention focusing) and self-reflective content (evaluative and affect-laden). Children produced less task-relevant private speech during the card sort relative to the Duplo task. Children demonstrated all content subtypes with performance content being most prevalent. Forethought content was positively associated with Duplo construction accuracy when children were aged between 36 months to 54 months. In addition, there was a negative association between task-irrelevant content and Duplo construction accuracy. Our findings suggest that preschool children whose private speech contains more forethought content may experience greater success on similar tasks.