Compare and contrast Piaget's and Vygotsky's views on children's private speech, and evaluate each on the basis of research findings

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Piaget called preschoolers' utterances egocentric speech, reflecting his belief that young children have difficulty taking the perspectives of others. Their talk, he said, is often "talk for self" in which they express thoughts in whatever form they happen to occur, regardless of whether a listener can understand. Piaget believed that cognitive development and certain social experiences eventually bring an end to egocentric speech. Specifically, through repeated disagreements with peers, children see that others hold viewpoints different from their own. As a result, egocentric speech declines in favor of social speech, in which children adapt what they say to their listeners.
Vygotsky disagreed strongly with Piaget's conclusions. Because language helps children think about mental activities and behavior and select courses of action, Vygotsky saw it as the foundation for all higher cognitive processes, including controlled attention, deliberate memorization and recall, categorization, planning, problem solving, abstract reasoning, and self-reflection. In Vygotsky's view, children speak to themselves for self-guidance. As they get older and find tasks easier, their self-directed speech is internalized as silent, inner speech—the internal verbal dialogues we carry on while thinking and acting in everyday situations.
Over the past three decades, almost all studies have supported Vygotsky's perspective. As a result, children's self-directed speech is now called private speech instead of egocentric speech. Children use more of it when tasks are appropriately challenging (neither too easy nor too hard), after they make errors, or when they are confused about how to proceed. With age, as Vygotsky predicted, private speech goes underground, changing into whispers and silent lip movements. Furthermore, children who freely use self-guiding private speech during a challenging activity are more attentive and involved and show better task performance than their less talkative agemates.