Speech monitoring and repairs in preschool children’s social and private speech

• While self-repairs were made in both types of speech, preschoolers made more self-repairs in social than private speech.
• Most private speech self-repairs were task-action relevant; social speech self-repairs were distributed across categories.
• High numbers of private speech immediate repairs suggests more pre-production private speech monitoring.
• Developmental differences between 3- and 4-year-olds emerged in the speech content of self-repairs.
• Findings have implications for how children use speech to regulate behavior and for how speech awareness develops.

When individuals correct their own speech, it is often assumed they are doing so for the benefit of others’ comprehension. As such, most of the research exploring speech repairs, especially among young children, has been conducted with social speech (between two or more people) and little with private speech (speech directed toward the self). In the present study, we explore social and private speech errors and self-repairs from 27 3- and 4-year-old preschoolers who completed a selective attention task and a Lego construction task with and without an involved experimenter. Timing (immediate, delayed) and relevance to task (irrelevant, relevant, action relevant) of self-repairs were compared, and developmental trends were explored. Findings indicated preschoolers made errors and repairs in both private and social speech, though more so in social than private speech. In social speech, there were nearly equal numbers of delayed and immediate repairs suggesting both pre- and post-production monitoring when speaking for a listener. In private speech, there were significantly higher numbers of immediate repairs than delayed repairs suggesting more pre-production monitoring when speaking for the self. Though fewer in number, the presence of delayed self-repairs in private speech indicated some post-production monitoring of private speech. Delayed private speech self-repairs from 4-year-olds were almost exclusively in task-action-relevant speech, while delayed private speech self-repairs from 3-year-olds were mostly in task-relevant speech. Developmental changes in private speech use and awareness of speech during preschool are discussed as possible explanations for these trends. Implications for practice are also provided.