The verbalization of cognitive processes: Thinking-aloud data and retrospective reports

The present paper combines two lines of research from discourse analysis and psychology by investigating thinking-aloud data and retrospective reports related to a cognitively demanding task, namely, a variant of the well-known Traveling Salesman Problem involving navigation to a set of goals. The analysis addresses the linguistic variability emerging from a discourse-analytic comparison of three task variants corresponding to distinct perspectives on the cognitive processes involved. The investigation of systematic differences in relation to the given task and discourse setting leads to a better understanding of the relationship between language and underlying conceptions.