Week 5: Egocentric speech

and learning by self-regulation

Piaget and Vygotsky

“I can do that by another which I cannot do alone. I can say to you what I cannot say to myself. ” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men (1850)

“The very essence of cultural development is in the collision of mature cultural forms of behavior with the primitive forms that characterize the child's behavior. ” L. S. Vygotsky, “The genesis of higher mental functions” (1981, p. 151)

Jean Piaget (1896-1980)• Swiss psychologist pioneering systematic study of child knowledge and

later, genetic epistemology: which "proposes discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge"

• At 10(!) published on observations of albino sparrow, at 15 his publications on mollusks were well known by European zoologists

• Studied under Carl Jung & Eugen Bleuler (Zurich); in Paris devised & administered reading tests to schoolchildren and became interested in the types of errors they made, then exploring children's reasoning processes. 1921: Dir. Institut J.J. Rousseau (Geneva).

• 1929-1980: U. Geneva: Prof child psychology - Ingenious questioner & observer of children – “the first to take children’s thinking seriously”

• 50 books - how child's mind evolves through ordered developmental stages for conceptualizing/acting on models of the world

• Piaget's concept of developmental stages influenced education: if stages determine thinking that is possible, simple reinforcement insufficient to teach concepts until child's mental development at the proper stage to assimilate those concepts. Teacher's role = guide child's own discovery of the world – not to transmit knowledge

Language and Thought of the Child(1926/1951)

• Investigation of functions of children’s language in a nursery in Geneva.

• Followed two children, 6 years old, for a month in a nursery, writing down all their talk.

• Distinguishes egocentric and socialized talk; by creating an inventory of children’s spontaneous speech, and distinguishing different types of egocentric and socialized speech, he sought to establish a measure of verbal egocentrism

• He then finds egocentric speech fading out with age and socially adaptive speech increasing in its frequency

Vygotsky’s Roots(from Pea, 1985)

• Influenced by Vico, Spinoza, and Hegel, Marx and Engels developed a theory of society now described as historical or dialectical materialism.

• On this theory human nature - rather than being a product of environmental forces - is of our own making and continually "becoming."

• Humankind is reshaped through a dialectic of reciprocal influences: Our productive activities change the world, thus changing the ways that the world can change us. By shaping nature and how our interactions with it are mediated, we change ourselves.

• A change in the instruments of work changes the functional system of humans' relation to work: What humans do as their tasks differs, not only do they accomplish the work faster.

• On this cultural-historical perspective, labor is seen as the factor mediating humans and nature. By creating and using physical instruments (e. g., machinery) that mediate in less & less direct ways our interactions with nature, we reshape human nature.

• To integrate accounts of individual and cultural changes, Vygotsky and Luria generalized Marx and Engels' historical materialism developed for physical instruments to an historical analysis of symbolic tools like written language that shape culture and human nature. Vygotsky (1978) recognized that "the sign acts as an instrument of psychological activity in a manner analogous to the role of a tool in labor" (p. 52).

Giambattista Vico (1668–1744)

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677)

Georg Hegel (1770-1831)

Karl Marx (1818–1883)

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)

Lev S. Vygotsky (1896-1934)• Studied@U. Moscow to become a literature teacher. First

studied art creation.• 1924-> Launched work in developmental psychology,

education, psychopathology; contributions in philosophy, linguistics & literature; Died of tuberculosis in 1934

• Pioneer of cultural-historical theory of learning processes: cognitive activities shaped in a matrix of social history and form the products of sociohistorical development that then shape learning for others

• One's cognitive skills and thinking patterns emerge via activities practiced in the social institutions of local culture - history of the society where child reared and child's personal history shape how that individual will think.

• Thinking and speaking criss-cross in their developments; providing resources to one another - Language not merely an expression of knowledge child has acquired.

• Famed for "zone of proximal development": difference between the child's capacity to solve problems on his own, and his capacity to solve them with assistance.

Piaget and Vygotsky on Egocentric Speech (ES)

Dimension of comparison

Piaget Vygotsky

What egocentric speech represents

Symptom of immaturity; by-product of activity

Instrument of thought; mediator of activity

Function of egocentric speech

Useless Self-regulation, planning

Developmental fate Dies off Goes ‘underground’; facilitates intermediate stage from vocal to inner speech; surfaces in face of difficulties in activity

Developmental sequence Individual autistic -> egocentric -> social speech

Social before individual: egocentric -> inner speech

Piaget and Vygotsky on Egocentric Speech (ES)

Dimension of comparison

Piaget Vygotsky

Role of things/activity for reality

Don’t shape a mind Shape a mind – since egocentric speech is connected with practical activities

Relation of child to social order

Outside, then ‘coerced’ Relations experienced outside brought inside

Nature of scientific claims

Universal across situations; law of nature

Milieu-specific; historically-socially determined

Piaget’s 1962 response to Vygotsky’s critique• Concurs with Vygotsky's "new hypothesis" - that egocentric speech is the point of

departure for the development of inner speech, which is found at a later stage of development, and that this interiorized language can serve both autistic ends and logical thinking

• Piaget argues that Vygotsky failed to appreciate egocentrism as the main obstacle to the co-ordination of viewpoints/co-operation. Says while Vygotsky reproaches him rightly for not emphasizing the functional aspect of egocentric speech, he did so later, in The Moral Judgment of the Child, where he studied children’s group games (marbles, etc.) and noted that before the age of seven they do not know how to co-ordinate the rules during a game, so that each one plays for himself, and all win, without understanding that the point is competition.

• Agreed: Vygotsky's conclusion that early function of language is global communication and that speech is later differentiated into egocentric and communicative.

• Disagreed: when Vygotsky maintains that these two linguistic forms are equally socialized and differ only in function, since egocentric speech is only "socialized" in the sense that there is contact between speaker and listener, but that speech is unadapted to the listener from the point of view of intellectual co-operation.