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Language, Speech, and Thought

Twentieth-century psychology has attempted to be scientific. This has generally meant that

it is the obligation of psychologists to limit themselves to tangible phenomena--behavior that can

be measured, recorded, materially manipulated. Until recently, terms like stimulus and

response were preferred to notions such as mind, thought, idea, and mental

representation. More recently it has become clear that regularities in measurable and observable

behavior can be accounted for by postulating internal structures and processes; but in the early

days of American behaviorism, such theorizing was held to a minimum. Accordingly, it was far

more acceptable to talk about speech than to make claims about thought. An extreme position

was formulated in 1913 by John B. Watson, the father of American behaviorist psychology:

according to my view, thought processes are really motor habits in the larynx. What Watson, and

his followers, meant was that thought and speech are one and the same thing, thus making thought

directly available to scientific study in the form of measurement of movements of the speechmusculature.

A less extreme position has a rich history in Russian psychology. One of the earliest scientific

positions taken on this problem was voiced in 1863 by Ivan M. Sechenov, the father of Russian

physiology and mentor of Pavlov (p. 498):

When a child thinks he invariably talks at the same time. Thought in five-year-olds is mediated through

words or whispers, surely through movements of the tongue and lips, which is also very frequently (perhaps

always, hut in different degrees) true of the thinking of adults.

The Russian position, then, is that language and thought are closely linked in childhood, but

that, in the course of development, adult thinking becomes free of language in some ways--at least

free of overt or covert SPEECH RESPONSES. This position was most significantly elaborated by

the great Soviet psychologist of the 1930s, L. S. Vygotsky. In his major work, Thought and

Language (1962), first published in the USSR after his untimely death in 1934, Vygotsky

developed the notion that in both phylogeny and ontogeny there are strains of nonverbal thought

(e.g., tool thought involved in the solution of instrumental problems) and nonintellectual speech

(e.g., emotional cries). He attempted to trace the interacting development of these two strains until

the point in human development at which speech can serve thought and thought can be revealed in

speech.

In the chapter on child language you have encountered related arguments about the ways in

which cognitive development precedes and shapes linguistic development. This position--

presenting a clear opposition to the behaviorist tradition--is based on the extensive work on

cognitive development carried out over the past fifty years in Geneva by Jean Piaget and his

colleagues. According to Piagets school, cognitive development proceeds on its own, generally

being followed by linguistic development, or finding reflection in the childs language. The childs

intellect grows through interaction with things and people in the environment. To the extent that

language is involved in these interactions, it may amplify or facilitate development in some cases,

but it does not in itself bring about cognitive growth.

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(Slobin, Dan Isaac. 1979.Psycholinguistics. 144-145. Scott, Foresman and Company.)