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Blogs
Constance’s and Katya’s Scientific Mission to Newcastle
Constance Vissers (Radboud University Nijmegen, Royal Dutch Kentalis, the Netherlands) and Katya Tomas (Neurolinguistics Lab, National Research University HSE, Russia) visited James Law (Newcastle University, the UK) in June.
The idea for this Short Term Scientific Mission was inspired by a lively discussion with James Law after a lecture given by Constance and Katya at the COST IS1406 meeting in November, 2017 in Utrecht. Together with James, they decided to collaborate on developing a new paradigm for studying the phenomenon of Inner Speech in children across languages, and in particular in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), whose Inner Speech abilities are likely compromised by their language deficits.
Inner Speech (IS) is believed to play a crucial role in a variety of cognitive processes including social cognition, executive functioning, and imagination as it presumably shapes the way we think and rationalize about events (Vygotsky, 1962, 1978, 1987). However, the association between the development of IS in children, particularly in those with language-learning difficulties is still poorly understood. Specifically, since unlike their typically developing peers, children with DLD cannot rely on IS to the same extent when performing cognitively demanding tasks, it is not clear which compensatory mechanisms they might develop. Also, given the importance of the internal dialogue for Theory of Mind and executive functions, it is not clear how its absence might affect these children’s social and emotional understanding and planning and organizing skills, which tend to also develop with a delay in this population (Vissers & Hermans, 2017).
Our STSM started with two days of animated discussions on the types of IS phenomena, which have been previously explored in the literature, and their respective measurements. These IS varieties range from expanded (i.e., morphosyntactically and semantically well-structured phenomena, often experienced during silent reading or covert articulation) to more condensed varieties of IS experienced during mental recall and similar cognitive processes (inter alia Alderson-Day & Fernyhough, 2015). On Wednesday, we gave a presentation at Newcastle University, discussing our research proposal with colleagues and brainstorming on the types of IS measurements we might use in our future experiments with children with DLD. This also helped us finalize the list of questions to discuss with Assistant Professor Ben Alderson-Day at Durham University, whom we visited the following day. Ben and his team are experts in studying IS in adults, and we thus came from Newcastle to Durham to talk about some theoretical and methodological difficulties in studying these problems in children, and particularly in those with DLD, who may have insufficient verbal skills to respond to questionnaires and also have age-related limitations in self-monitoring abilities. Our meeting with Ben Alderson-Day was very fruitful and we will feed these discussions into the review of IS that we are planning to carry out. On the way to the meeting James gave a fascinating tour through Durham Cathedral. This UNESCO World Heritage Site is overwhelming beautiful and we highly recommend it to any of our COST colleagues who happen to be in the area! We closed our Mission by making plans to collaborate on a review paper and to carry out a series of experiments with typically developing children and those with DLD in the Netherlands, Russia, and the UK. We already had a follow up meeting by Skype and are looking forward to continued collaboration!
Last modified: Tue, 17 Jul 2018 09:31:50 BST