Thinking and Speech and Protocol Analysis

Abstract

Some form of verbal report—that is, a research participant' s concurrent or retrospective verbal account of thought processes during problem-solving activities—has been used throughout this century as the database from which psychologists have developed theories of human mentation. Newell and Simon (1972) and Ericsson and Simon (1980, 1993) have provided extensive justification for using one such method, protocol analysis, as a tool for investigating cognition from an information-processing (IP) perspective. Their arguments have characterized protocol analysis as a methodology capable of providing evidence of the ways in which people attend to information stored in short-term memory to solve problems, with the evidence providing them with the grounds from which to generate models of human cognitive processes. A different view of protocol analysis is available from the perspective of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) based on the work of Vygotsky (1987), Leont'ev (1981), and others, and its concern with the mediation of human development by culturally and historically grounded signs and tools. Because of its emphasis on culturally channeled development, a CHAT perspective views speech, including the speech that serves as evidence for cognition in psychological research, as a tool that potentially enables changes in consciousness. In this article I outline a CHAT perspective that accounts for protocol analysis along three key dimensions: (a) the relation between thinking and speech from a representational standpoint, (b) the social role of speech in research methodology, and (c) the influence of speech on thinking during data collection. The purpose of this discussion is not to refute the IP perspective on protocol analysis but to illustrate how this method can be viewed through a CHAT lens and to identify alternative assumptions that must be made to use it from a CHAT perspective.