Metacognitive Private Speech: Links with parent language and achievement orientation, reciprocal socialization, and socioeconomic status

Metacognitive Private Speech: Links with parent language and achievement orientation, reciprocal socialization, and socioeconomic status

Theories and popular constructs about “intelligence” and “ability” reveal two major camps: incremental theorists, who believe “intelligence” and “ability” are changeable through hard work, and entity theorists, who believe these are fixed and unchangeable. In one study (Sawyer 2017), children’s performance on a fishing game task positively correlated with frequency of metacognitive private speech. Self-talk demonstrates a child’s awareness and self-regulation of thought processes, an important facet of metacognition. Our study explores how metacognitive private speech may be linked to parent language and achievement orientation, reciprocal socialization, and socioeconomic status (SES). Nine preschool aged children from high SES backgrounds completed Sawyer’s (2017) fishing game task, allowing measurement of mastery oriented language as a function of persistence in catching “impossible” fish. Frequencies of metacognitive language were correlated with parent language data for achievement orientation, suggesting potential forms of mental-state reasoning socialization. Preliminary data from both low and high SES families show that high SES parents tended to increase their questions about explanations when the child succeeded, whereas low SES increased their emphasis on ability when the child succeeded.