Figure 1.

A Vygotskian account of the social–emotional problems of individuals with hearing and language problems. Social emotional functioning can be explained in terms of executive functioning and theory of mind, which in turn are affected by non-sensory representations created in self-directed speech. Non-sensory representations are images or descriptions corresponding to external events that do not coincide with direct observation. The ability to construct non-sensory representations is constrained by the level of word meaning structure.