A Comparative Study Of Chinese & English-speaking Children's Private Speech

Private speech, a common phenomenon in children's acquisition of native language, was introduced into the researches on education, psychology and language acquisition by Piaget. So far, amounts of researches on children's private speech were mainly conducted on English-speaking children, while only a few of the researches have been conducted on Chinese-speaking children's private speech, not to mention the researches on the ethnic difference among their private speeches. This thesis tries to find the similarities and differences between them by comparing the private speech of Chinese-speaking children with that of English-speaking ones, so as to explore whether there exists a unique way of private speech developing in Chinese-speaking children. The results of the study can also provide a new horizon to the researches on second language acquisition.Besides the introduction and the conclusion part, the thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter gives an introduction to Piaget's and Vygotsky's understandings of children's private speech, together with that of Luria's and of Vocate's. Also in this chapter, criteria for private speech, its classification, the influential factors, together with the researches of private speech in China are introduced.In Chapter Two, the age-related features of children's private speech are compared ethnically among four children. Linguistic data of two English-speaking children at age ranged from 2 to 3, being selected from the Brown Corpus, are compared with that of two Chinese-speaking children'at the same age. CLAN tools and SPSS17.0 were used for data analyzing. It is discovered that though similar to English-speaking children in their age-related curves of private speech frequency, Chinese-speaking children show an earlier function shift of their private speech.In Chapter Three, the influences of play type and of adult presence on children's private speech are studied ethnically. Besides speaking more to themselves in play time than Chinese-speaking children do, English-speaking children are also found to show the similar play-related frequency changing curves to each other; while the curves are found to be quite different from each other in two Chinese-speaking children's case. In analyzing the correlation involvement and the children's private speech, all the children are found to speak the least to themselves when the caregivers took part in their activities directly.In second language acquisition, this study provides a new research perspective. Firstly, since task-related private speech can help develop advanced language learner, the educator can aid adult's language learning by encouraging task-related private speech. Secondly, on account that caregiver's presentation can influence children's private speech significantly, the teacher's participation can also alter according to the activity so as to assist the internalization of language learners.