Abstract

The present study aims at investigating the effect of instructional and motivational self talk on basketball shooting, dribbling and passing tasks in adults and adolescents. A number of 114 novice adult and adolescent participants were randomly assigned into three groups: instructional self talk, motivational self talk and control group. The assigning was carried out on each age group independently. The instructional self talk group used the phrase wrist, center for shooting task, finger, target for Passing task and low, rhythm for dribbling task. The motivational self talk group used the phrase I can for all the three tasks. The results of factorial ANOVA showed no significant difference between the effect of motivational and instructional self talk on adolescents comparing with adults in shooting task. There was no difference in Passing performance between adult and adolescent instructional self talk groups. However, there was a significant difference in passing performance between adult and adolescent motivational self talk groups. In dribbling task, instructional self talk culminated in better performance in adults comparing with adolescents. Nevertheless, motivational self talk yielded better dribbling performance in adolescents comparing with adults (P≤0.05). The results supported the task-dependent relationship between age and self talk efficacy. Therefore, based on the type of the task, different types of self talk may differently affect task performance.