Syntactic, lexical and content analysis of children's private speech

This dissertation aimed at investigating private speech of 3, 4 and 5 years olds Turkish preschoolers. The first aim was to explore linguistic properties of private speech, namely its lexical, morphosyntactic and syntactic features which are expected to present features that are different from previous studies in other languages. This study also aimed to reveal content properties of Turkish children's private speech. Another purpose of this dissertation was to study the social origins of private speech by comparing linguistic and content features of private speech with social speech that children produced when they were completing the same task with their mothers. Data for the present study was collected in two stages; firstly, private speech data from children were gathered, secondly data from mother-child interactions were collected. In the first stage, private speech data was collected from 28 children aged between 3;1 and 5;7. There were 8 children in three year olds' group and 10 children in each of the 4 and 5 year olds' groups. In the data collection process, children were video recorded in a separate room in the kindergarten while they were playing with a wooden toy house which has removable household items and toy family figures. In the second stage, 5 of the same children from each group were video recorded while completing the same task with their mothers. Results revealed that self-regulation, planning and problem solving functions of private speech were represented by specific usages in children's language. It is also found out that Turkish private speech is not predicated and syntactically abbreviated in the same way as Vygotsky proposed. Internalization of Turkish private speech was only traced with the increase in the partially internalized utterances with age. Comparisons of private speech and mother-child interactions revealed similarities that demonstrate evidence for the social origins of private speech.