Abstract

The major purpose of this study is to investigate the children's categorization task performances according to pea collaboration condition(real/imaginary/no-peer condition) and their speech types focusing on the relationships between children's speech types which are induced by peer collaboration conditions and their task performances. Subjects consisted of one hundred and twenty-six, 5- and 7-year-old children in Seoul. Results indicate that there were significant differences in children's categorization task performances between real-peer condition and no-peer condition, but partly significant differences between imaginary-peer condition and other conditions. There were significant correlation between some speech types and categorization task performances, and these correlated speech types represented significant differences according to peer collaboration condition. These results varied depending on age and 7-year-olds showed higher task performances and uttered more performance-related, contributable speech types as well. This provided some evidence that there are relations abort speech type, peer collaboration condition, and task performance, so children who performed categorization task in collaboration with real/imaginary peer can show higher scores by uttering more contributable types of speech than those who performed alone, and this relation varies according to age.