Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study focuses on the "classical" topic of the relation between language and thinking. Empirical studies investigating the interaction of verbalization and problem solving show inconsistent results. Studies differ with respect to the instruction of verbalization and the characteristics of the task. The aim of the study is to compare the performance in a nonverbal problem with and without language. For this purpose we investigate the performance of six groups of subjects working under different conditions: some of them were disturbed in their language behavior, others were encouraged to verbalize. It could be shown that though they had to work on a non-verbal problem, subjects disturbed in their linguistic behavior showed a worse performance than controls. Furthermore it can be shown that ."hinking aloud" in itself does not guarantee an improvement of performance. Moreover there are specific aspects of thinking aloud supporting problem solving. Case studies reveal interesting results with respect to the specific structure of "helpful" verbalization. The differences found cannot be explained by different memory loads or by the degree of distraction.