CONCEPT
Egocentric Speech
The young child's practice of talking aloud while thinking — read by Piaget as a developmental limitation and by Vygotsky as an achievement on the path to inner speech, the intermediate stage in the appropriation of language for cognition.
Egocentric speech is the audible thinking of young children: the running commentary on their own problem-solving that Piaget observed and interpreted as evidence of the child's inability to take another's perspective. The cultural-historical reversal was decisive. Vygotsky argued that egocentric speech is not failed communication but emerging cognition — the child practicing the cognitive use of language in an audible form, on the way to the silent internalization that produces inner speech. The child who narrates 'the red one goes here, no that doesn't work, maybe the blue one' is not communicating with anyone. She is using language as a cognitive tool, organizing her thinking through speaking. Her speech is developmentally on the way to becoming thought.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Piaget–Vygotsky disagreement on this point encapsulates the two traditions' deeper divide. For Piaget, development moved from individual to social — from the child's initial egocentrism to eventual decentration and