Vygotsky
Thinking and Speaking
Thinking and Speaking
4. The Genetic Roots of Thought and
Speech
I
THE most
important fact uncovered through the genetic study of thought and speech is
that their relationship undergoes many changes. Progress in thought and
progress in speech are not parallel. Their two growth curves cross and recross.
They may straighten out and run side by side, even merge for a time, but they
always diverge again. This applies to both phylogeny and ontogeny.
In animals, speech and thought spring from different roots and develop
along different lines. This fact is confirmed by Koehler’s, Yerkes’s, and other
recent studies of apes. Koehler’s experiments proved that the appearance in
animals of an embryonic intellect – i.e., of thinking in the proper sense – is in
no way related to speech. The “inventions” of apes in making and using tools,
or in finding detours for the solution of problems, though undoubtedly
rudimentary thinking, belong in a prelinguistic phase of thought development.
In Koehler’s opinion, his investigations prove that the chimpanzee
shows the beginnings of an intellectual behavior of the same kind and type as
man’s. It is the lack of speech, “that infinitely valuable technical aid,” and
the paucity of images, “that most important intellectual material,” which
explain the tremendous difference between anthropoids and the most primitive
man and make “even the slightest beginnings of cultural development impossible
for the chimpanzee” [18, pp. 191-192].
There is considerable disagreement among psychologists of different
schools about the theoretical interpretation of Koehler’s findings. The mass of
critical literature that his studies have called forth represents a variety of
viewpoints. It is all the more significant that no one disputes Koehler’s facts
or the deduction which particularly interests us: the independence of the
chimpanzee’s actions from speech. This is freely admitted even by the
psychologists (for example, Thorndike or Borovskij) who do not see anything in
the chimpanzee’s actions beyond the mechanics of instinct and of
“trial-and-error” learning, “nothing at all except the already known process of
habit formation” [4, p. 179], and by the introspectionists, who shy away from
lowering intellect to the level of even the most advanced behavior of apes.
Buehler says quite rightly that the actions of the chimpanzees are entirely
unconnected with speech; and that in man the thinking involved in the use of
tools (Werkzeugdenken) also is much less connected with speech and with
concepts than are other forms of thought.
The issue would be quite simple if apes had no rudiments of language,
nothing at all resembling speech. We do, however, find in the chimpanzee a
relatively well-developed “language,” in some respects – most of all
phonetically – not unlike human speech. The remarkable thing about his language
is that it functions apart from his intellect. Koehler, who studied chimpanzees
for many years at the Canary Island Anthropoid Station, tells us that their
phonetic expressions denote only desires and subjective states; they are
expressions of affects, never a sign of anything “objective” [19, p. 27]. But
chimpanzee and human phonetics have so many elements in common that we may
confidently suppose that the absence of humanlike speech is not due to any
peripheral causes.
The chimpanzee is an extremely gregarious animal and responds strongly
to the presence of others of his kind. Koehler describes highly diversified
forms of “linguistic communication” among chimpanzees. First in line is their
vast repertory of affective expressions: facial play, gestures, vocalization;
next come the movements expressing social emotions: gestures of greeting, etc.
The apes are capable both of “understanding” one another’s gestures and of
“expressing,” through gestures, desires involving other animals. Usually a
chimpanzee will begin a movement or an action he wants another animal to
perform or to share – e.g., will push him and execute the initial movements of
walking when “inviting” the other to follow him, or grab at the air when he
wants the other to give him a banana. All these are gestures directlyrelated to the action itself.
Koehler mentions that the experimenter comes to use essentially similar
elementary ways of communication to convey to the apes what is expected of
them.
By and large, these observations confirm Wundt’s opinion that pointing
gestures, the first stage in the development of human speech, do not yet appear
in animals but that some gestures of apes are a transitional form between
grasping and pointing [56, p. 219]. We consider this transitional gesture a
most important step from unadulterated affective expression toward objective
language.
There is no evidence, however, that animals reach the stage of
objective representation in any of their activities. Koehler’s chimpanzees
played with colored clay, “painting” first with lips and tongue, later with
real paintbrushes; but these animals – who normally transfer to play the use of
tools and other behavior learned “in earnest” (i.e., in experiments) and,
conversely, play behavior to “real life” – never exhibited the slightest intent
of representing anything in their drawings or the slightest sign of attributing
any objective meaning to their products. Buehler says:
Certain
facts warn its against overestimating the chimpanzee’s actions. We know that no
traveller has ever mistaken a gorilla or a chimpanzee for a man, and that no
one has ever observed among them any of the traditional tools or methods that
with humans vary from tribe to tribe but indicate the transmission from
generation to generation of discoveries once made; no scratchings on sandstone
or clay that could be taken for designs representing anything or even for
ornaments scratched in play; no representational language, i.e., no sounds equivalent
to names. All this together must have some intrinsic causes [7, p. 20].
Yerkes seems to be the only one among modern observers of apes to
explain their lack of speech otherwise than by “intrinsic causes.” His research
on the intellect of orangutans yielded data very similar to Koehler’s; but he
goes further in his conclusions: He admits “higher ideation” in orangs – on the
level, it is true, of a three-year-old child at most [57, p. 132].
Yerkes deduces ideation merely from superficial similarities between
anthropoid and human behavior; he has no objective proof that orangs solve
problems with the help of ideation, i.e., of “images,” or trace stimuli. In the
study of the higher animals, analogy may be used to good purpose within the
boundaries of objectivity, but basing an assumption on analogy is hardly a
scientific procedure.
Koehler, on the other hand, went beyond the mere use of analogy in
exploring the nature of the chimpanzee’s intellectual processes. He showed by
precise experimental analysis that the success of the animals’ actions depended
on whether they could see all the elements of a situation simultaneously – this
was a decisive factor in their behavior. If, especially during the earlier
experiments, the stick they used to reach some fruit lying beyond the bars was
moved slightly, so that the tool (stick) and the goal (fruit) were not visible
to them at one glance, the solution of the problem became very difficult, often
impossible. The apes had learned to make a longer tool by inserting one stick
into an opening in another. If the two sticks accidentally crossed in their
hands, forming an X, they became unable to perform the familiar, much-practiced
operation of lengthening the tool. Dozens of similar examples from Koehler’s
experiments could be cited.
Koehler considers the actual visual presence of a sufficiently simple
situation an indispensable condition in any investigation of the intellect of
chimpanzees, a condition without which their intellect cannot be made to
function at all; he concludes that the inherent limitations of imagery (or
“ideation”) are a basic feature of the chimpanzee’s intellectual behavior. If
we accept Koehler’s thesis, then Yerkes’s assumption appears more than
doubtful.
In connection with his recent experimental and observational studies of
the intellect and language of chimpanzees, Yerkes presents new material on
their linguistic development and a new, ingenious theory to account for their
lack of real speech. “Vocal reactions,” he says, “are very frequent and varied
in young chimpanzees, but speech in the human sense is absent” [58, p. 53].
Their vocal apparatus is as well developed and functions as well as man’s. What
is missing is the tendency to imitate sounds. Their mimicry is almost entirely
dependent on optical stimuli; they copy actions but not sounds. They are
incapable of doing what the parrot does so successfully.
If the imitative tendency of the parrot were combined with the caliber
of intellect of the chimpanzee, the latter undoubtedly would possess speech,
since he has a voice mechanism comparable to man’s as well as an intellect of
the type and level to enable him to use sounds for purposes of real speech [58,
p. 53].
In his experiments, Yerkes applied four methods of teaching chimpanzees
to speak. None of them succeeded. Such failures, of course, never solve a
problem in principle. In this case, we still do not know whether or not it is
possible to teach chimpanzees to speak. Not uncommonly the fault lies with the
experimenter. Koehler says that if earlier studies of chimpanzee intellect
failed to show that he had any, this was not because the chimpanzee really has
none but because of inadequate methods, ignorance of the limits of difficulty
within which the chimpanzee intellect can manifest itself, ignorance of its
dependence on a comprehensive visual situation. “Investigations of intellectual
capacity,” quipped Koehler, “necessarily test the experimenter as well as the
subject” [18, p. 191].
Without settling the issue in principle, Yerkes’s experiments showed
once more that anthropoids do not have anything like human speech, even in
embryo. Correlating this with what we know from other sources, we may assume
that apes are probably incapable of real speech.
What are the causes of their inability to speak, since they have the
necessary voice apparatus and phonetic range? Yerkes sees the cause in the
absence or weakness of vocal imitativeness. This may very well have been the
immediate cause of the negative results of his experiments, but he is probably
wrong in seeing it as the fundamental cause of the lack of speech in apes. The
latter thesis, though Yerkes presents it as established, is belied by
everything we know of the chimpanzee’s intellect.
Yerkes had at his disposal an excellent means of checking his thesis,
which for some reason he did not use and which we should be only too happy to
apply if we had the material possibility. We should exclude the auditory factor
in training the animals in a linguistic skill. Language does not of necessity
depend on sound. There are, for instance, the sign language of deaf-mutes and
lip reading, which is also interpretation of movement. In the languages of
primitive peoples, gestures are used along with sound, and play a substantial
role. In principle, language does not depend on the nature of its material. If
it is true that the chimpanzee has the intellect for acquiring something
analogous to human language, and the whole trouble lies in his lacking vocal
imitativeness, then he should be able, in experiments, to master some
conventional gestures whose psychological function would be exactly the same as
that of conventional sounds. As Yerkes himself conjectures, the chimpanzees
might be trained, for instance, to use manual gestures rather than sounds. The
medium is beside the point; what matters is the functional
use of signs, any
signs that could play a role corresponding to that of speech in humans.
This method has not been tested, and we cannot be sure what its results
might have been, but everything we know of chimpanzee behavior, including
Yerkes’s data, dispels the hope that they could learn functional speech. Not a
hint of their using signs has ever been heard of. The only thing we know with
objective certainty is not that they have “ideation” but that under certain
conditions they are able to make very simple tools and resort to “detours,” and
that these conditions include a completely visible, utterly clear situation. In
all problems not involving immediately perceived visual structures but
centering on some other kind of structure – mechanical, for instance the
chimpanzees switched from an insightful type of behavior to the trial-and-error
method pure and simple.
Are the conditions required for the apes’ effective intellectual
functioning also the conditions required for discovering speech or discovering
the functional use of signs? Definitely not. Discovery of speech cannot, in any
situation, depend on an optical set up. It demands an intellectual operation of
a different kind. There are no indications whatever of such an operation’s
being within the chimpanzees’ reach, and most investigators assume that they
lack this ability. This lack may be the chief difference between chimpanzee and
human intellect.
Koehler introduced the term insight (Einsicht) for the intellectual
operations accessible to chimpanzees. The choice of term is not accidental.
Kafka pointed out that Koehler seems to mean by it primarily seeing in the literal sense and only by
extension “seeing” of relations generally, or comprehension as opposed to blind
action [17, p. 130].
It must be said that Koehler never defines insight or spells out its theory. In the
absence of theoretical interpretation, the term is somewhat ambiguous in its
application: Sometimes it denotes the specific characteristics of the operation
itself, the structure of the chimpanzees’ actions; and sometimes it indicates
the psychological process preceding and preparing these actions, an internal
“plan of operations,” as it were. Koehler advances no hypothesis about the
mechanism of the intellectual reaction, but it is clear that however it
functions and wherever we locate the intellect – in the actions themselves of
the chimpanzee or in some preparatory internal process (cerebral or
muscular-innervational) – the thesis remains valid that this reaction is
determined, not by memory traces, but by the situation as visually presented.
Even the best tool for a given problem is lost on the chimpanzee if he cannot
see it simultaneously or quasi-simultaneously with the goal.
By “quasi-simultaneous
perception” Koehler means instances when tool and goal had been seen together a
moment earlier, or when they had been used together so many times in identical
situation that they are to all intents and purposes simultaneously perceived
psychologically [18, p. 39].
Thus the consideration of “insight” does not change our conclusion that
the chimpanzee, even if he possessed the parrot’s gifts, would be exceedingly
unlikely to conquer speech.
Yet, as we have said, the chimpanzee has a fairly rich language of his
own. Yerkes’s collaborator Learned compiled a dictionary of thirty-two speech
elements, or “words,” which not only resemble human speech phonetically but
also have some meaning, in the sense that they are elicited by certain
situations or objects connected with pleasure or displeasure, or inspiring
desire, malice, fear [58, p. 54]. These “words” were written down while the
apes were waiting to be fed and during meals, in the presence of humans and
when two chimpanzees were alone. They are affective vocal reactions, more or
less differentiated and to some degree connected, in a conditioned-reflex
fashion, with stimuli related to feeding or other vital situations: a strictly
emotional language.
In connection with this description of ape speech, we should like to
make three points: First, the coincidence of sound production with affective
gestures, especially noticeable when the chimpanzees are very excited, is not
limited to anthropoids – it is, on the contrary, very common among animals
endowed with voice. Human speech certainly originated in the same kind of
expressive vocal reactions.
Second, the affective states producing abundant vocal reactions in
chimpanzees are unfavorable to the functioning of the intellect. Koehler
mentions repeatedly that in chimpanzees, emotional reactions, particularly
those of great intensity, rule out a simultaneous intellectual operation.
Third, it must be stressed again that emotional release as such is not
the only function of speech in apes. As in other animals and in man, it is also
a means of psychological contact with others of their kind. Both in the
chimpanzees of Yerkes and Learned and in the apes observed by Koehler, this
function of speech is unmistakable. But it is not connected with intellectual
reactions, i.e., with thinking. It originates in emotion and is clearly a part
of the total emotional syndrome, but a part that fulfils a specific function,
both biologically and psychologically. It is far removed from intentional,
conscious attempts to inform or influence others. In essence, it is an
instinctive reaction, or something extremely close to it.
There can hardly be any doubt that biologically this function of speech
is one of the oldest and is genetically related to the visual and vocal signals
given by leaders of animal groups. In a recently published study of the
language of bees, K. v. Frisch describes very interesting and theoretically
important forms of behavior that serve interchange or contact and indubitably
originate in instinct. In spite of the phenotypical differences, these
behavioral manifestations are basically similar to the speech interchange of
chimpanzees. This similarity points up once more the independence of chimpanzee
“communications” from any intellectual activity.
We undertook this analysis of several studies of ape language and
intellect to elucidate the relationship between thinking and speech in the
phylogenetic development of these functions. We can now summarize our
conclusions, which will be of use in the further analysis of the problem.
1.
Thought and speech have different genetic roots.
2. The
two functions develop along different lines and independently of each other.
3. There
is no clear-cut and constant correlation between them.
4.
Anthropoids display an intellect somewhat like man’s in
certain respects (the embryonic use of tools) and a language somewhat like man’s in
totally different respects (the phonetic aspect of their speech, its release
function, the beginnings of a social function).
5. The
close correspondence between thought and speech characteristic of man is absent
in anthropoids.
6. In
the phylogeny of thought and speech, a prelinguistic phase in the development
of thought and a preintellectual phase in the development of speech are clearly
discernible.
II
Ontogenetically,
the relation between thought and speech development is much more intricate and
obscure; but here, too, we can distinguish two separate lines springing from
two different genetic roots.
The existence of a prespeech phase of thought development in childhood
has only recently been corroborated by objective proof. Koehler’s experiments
with chimpanzees, suitably modified, were carried out on children who had not
yet learned to speak. Koehler himself occasionally experimented with children
for purposes of comparison, and Buehler undertook a systematic study of a child
on the same lines. The findings were similar for children and for apes.
The child’s actions, Buehler tells us,
were
exactly like those of the chimpanzees, so that this phase of child life could
rather aptly be called the chimpanzoid age; in our subject it corresponded
to the 10th, 11th, and 12th months. ... At the chimpanzoid age occur the
child’s first inventions very primitive ones to be sure, but extremely
important for his mental development [7, p. 46].
What is most important theoretically in these as well as in the
chimpanzee experiments is the discovery of the independence of the rudimentary
intellectual reactions from speech. Noting this, Buehler comments:
It used
to be said that speech was the beginning of hominization [Menschwerden]; maybe so, but before speech
there is the thinking involved in the use of tools, i.e., comprehension of
mechanical connections, and devising of mechanical means to mechanical ends,
or, to put it more briefly still, before speech appears action becomes
subjectively meaningful – in other words, consciously purposeful [7, p. 48].
The preintellectual roots of speech in child development have long been
known. The child’s babbling, crying, even his first words, are quite clearly
stages of speech development that have nothing to do with the development of
thinking. These manifestations have been generally regarded as a predominantly
emotional form of behavior. Not all of them, however, serve merely the function
of release. Recent investigations of the earliest forms of behavior in the
child and of the child’s first reactions to the human voice (by Charlotte
Buehler and her circle) have shown that the social function of speech is
already clearly apparent during the first year, i.e., in the preintellectual
stage of speech development. Quite definite reactions to the human voice were
observed as early as during the third week of life, and the first specifically
social reaction to voice during the second month [5, p. 124]. These
investigations also established that laughter, inarticulate sounds, movements,
etc., are means of social contact from the first months of the child’s life.
Thus the two functions of speech that we observed in phylogenetic
development are already present and obvious in the child less than one year
old.
But the most important discovery is that at a certain moment at about
the age of two the curves of development of thought and speech, till then
separate, meet and join to initiate a new form of behavior. Stern’s account of
this momentous event was the first and the best. He showed how the will to
conquer language follows the first dim realization of the purpose of speech,
when the child “makes the greatest discovery of his life,” that “each thing has
its name” [40, p. 108].
This crucial instant, when speech begins to serve intellect, and
thoughts begin to be spoken, is indicated by two unmistakable objective
symptoms: (1) the child’s sudden, active curiosity about words, his question
about every new thing, “What is this?” and (2) the resulting rapid, saccadic
increases in his vocabulary.
Before the turning point, the child does (like some animals) recognize
a small number of words which substitute, as in conditioning, for objects,
persons, actions, states, or desires. At that age the child knows only the
words supplied to him by other people. Now the situation changes: The child
feels the need for words and, through his questions, actively tries to learn
the signs attached to objects. He seems to have discovered the symbolic
function of words. Speech, which in the earlier stage was affective-connative,
now enters the intellectual phase. The lines of speech and thought development
have met.
At this point the knot is tied for the problem of thought and language.
Let us stop and consider exactly what it is that happens when the child makes
his “greatest discovery,” and whether Stern’s interpretation is correct.
Buehler and Koffka both compare this discovery to the chimpanzees’
inventions. According to Koffka the name, once discovered by the child, enters
into the structure of the object, just as the stick becomes part of the
situation of wanting to get the fruit [20, p. 243].
We shall discuss the soundness of this analogy later, when we examine
the functional and structural relationships between thought and speech. For the
present, we will merely note that the “greatest discovery of the child” becomes
possible only when a certain relatively high level of thought and speech
development has been reached. In other words, speech cannot be “discovered”
without thinking.
In brief, we must conclude that:
1. In
their ontogenetic development, thought and speech have different roots.
2. In
the speech development of the child, we can with certainty establish a
preintellectual stage, and in his thought development, a prelinguistic stage.
3. Up to
a certain point in time, the two follow different lines, independently of each
other.
4. At a
certain point these lines meet, whereupon thought becomes verbal and speech
rational.
III
No
matter how we approach the controversial problem of the relationship between
thought and speech, we shall have to deal extensively with inner
speech. Its
importance in all our thinking is so great that many psychologists, Watson
among others, even identify it with thought – which they regard as inhibited,
soundless speech. But psychology still does not know how the change from overt
to inner speech is accomplished, or at what age, by what process, and why it
takes place.
Watson says that we do not know at what point of their speech
organization children pass from overt to whispered and then to inner speech
because that problem has been studied only incidentally. Our own researches
lead us to believe that Watson poses the problem incorrectly. There are no
valid reasons to assume that inner speech develops in some mechanical way
through a gradual decrease in the audibility of speech (whispering).
It is true that Watson mentions another possibility: “Perhaps,” he
says, “all three forms develop simultaneously” [54, p. 322]. This hypothesis
seems to us as unfounded from the genetic point of view as the sequence: loud
speech, whisper, inner speech. No objective data reinforce that perhaps. Against it testify the profound
dissimilarities between external and inner speech, acknowledged by all
psychologists including Watson. There are no grounds for assuming that the two
processes, so different functionally (social as opposed to personal
adaptation) and structurally (the extreme, elliptical economy
of inner speech, changing the speech pattern almost beyond recognition), may be genetically parallel and concurrent. Nor (to
return to Watson’s main thesis) does it seem plausible that they are linked
together by whispered speech, which neither in function nor in structure can be
considered a transitional stage between external and inner speech. It, stands
between the two only phenotypically, not genotypically.
Our studies of whispering in young children fully substantiate this. We
have found that structurally there is almost no difference between whispering
and speaking aloud; functionally, whispering differs profoundly from inner
speech and does not even manifest a tendency toward the characteristics typical
of the latter. Furthermore, it does not develop spontaneously until school age,
though it may be induced very early: Under social pressure, a three-year-old
may, for short periods and with great effort, lower his voice or whisper. This
is the one point that may seem to support Watson’s view.
While disagreeing with Watson’s thesis, we believe that he has hit on
the right methodological approach: To solve the problem, we must look for the
intermediate link between overt and inner speech.
We are inclined to see that link in the child’s egocentric speech,
described by Piaget, which, besides its role of accompaniment to activity and
its expressive and release functions, readily assumes a planning function,
i.e., turns into thought proper quite naturally and easily.
If our hypothesis proves to be correct, we shall have to conclude that
speech is interiorized psychologically before it is interrorized physically.
Egocentric speech is inner speech in its functions; it is speech on its way
inward, intimately tied up with the ordering of the child’s behavior, already
partly incomprehensible to others, yet still overt in form and showing no
tendency to change into whispering or any other sort of half-soundless speech.
We should then also have the answer to the question of why speech turns
inward. It turns inward because its function changes. Its development would
still have three stages – not the ones Watson found, but these: external
speech, egocentric speech, inner speech. We should also have at our disposal an
excellent method for studying inner speech “live,” as it were, while its
structural and functional peculiarities are being shaped; it would be an
objective method since these peculiarities appear while speech is still
audible, i.e., accessible to observation and measurement.
Our investigations show that speech development follows the same course
and obeys the same laws as the development of all the other mental operations
involving the use of signs, such as counting or mnemonic memorizing. We found
that these operations generally develop in four stages. The first is the primitive
or natural stage, corresponding to preintellectual speech and preverbal
thought, when these operations appear in their original form, as they were
evolved at the primitive level of behavior.
Next comes the stage which we might call “naive psychology”, by analogy
with what is called “naive physics” – the child’s experience with the physical
properties of his own body and of the objects around him, and the application
of this experience to the use of tools: the first exercise of the child’s
budding practical intelligence.
This phase is very clearly defined in the speech development of the
child. It is manifested by the correct use of grammatical forms and structures
before the child has understood the logical operations for which they stand.
The child may operate with subordinate clauses, with words like because,
if, when, and but, long before he really grasps
causal, conditional, or temporal relations. He masters syntax of speech before
syntax of thought.
Piaget’s studies proved that grammar develops before logic and that the
child learns relatively late the mental operations corresponding to the verbal
forms he has been using for a long time.
With the gradual accumulation of naive psychological experience, the
child enters a third stage, distinguished by external signs, external
operations that are used as aids in the solution of internal problems. That is
the stage when the child counts on his fingers, resorts to mnemonic aids, and
so on. In speech development it is characterized by egocentric speech.
The fourth stage we call the “ingrowth” stage. The external operation
turns inward and undergoes a profound change in the process. The child begins
to count in his head, to use “logical memory,” that is, to operate with
inherent relationships and inner signs. In speech development this is the final
stage of inner, soundless speech. There remains a constant interaction between
outer and inner operations, one form effortlessly and frequently changing into
the other and back again. Inner speech may come very close in form to external
speech or even become exactly like it when it serves as preparation for
external speech – for instance, in thinking over a lecture to be given. There
is no sharp division between inner and external behavior, and each influences
the other.
In considering the function of inner speech in adults after the
development is completed, we must ask whether in their case thought and
linguistic processes are necessarily connected, whether the two can be equated.
Again, as in the case of animals and of children, we must answer “No.”
Schematically, we may imagine thought and speech as two intersecting
circles. In their overlapping parts, thought and speech coincide to produce
what is called verbal thought. Verbal thought, however, does not by any means
include all forms of thought or all forms of speech. There is a vast area of
thought that has no direct relation to speech. The thinking manifested in the
use of tools belongs in this area, as does practical intellect in general.
Furthermore, investigations by psychologists of the Würzburg school have
demonstrated that thought can function without any word images or speech
movements detectable through self-observation. The latest experiments show also
that there is no direct correspondence between inner speech and the subject’s
tongue or larynx movements.
Nor are there any psychological reasons to derive all forms of speech
activity from thought. No thought process may be involved when a subject
silently recites to himself a poem learned by heart or mentally repeats a
sentence supplied to him for experimental purposes – Watson notwithstanding.
Finally, there is “lyrical” speech prompted by emotion. Though it has all the
earmarks of speech, it can scarcely be classified with intellectual activity in
the proper sense of the term.
We are therefore forced to conclude that fusion of thought and speech,
in adults as well as in children, is a phenomenon limited to a circumscribed
area. Nonverbal thought and nonintellectual speech do not participate in this
fusion and are affected only indirectly by the processes of verbal thought.
IV
We can
now summarize the results of our analysis. We began by attempting to trace the
genealogy of thought and speech, using the data of comparative psychology.
These data are insufficient for tracing the developmental paths of prehuman
thought and speech with any degree of certainty, The basic question, whether
anthropoids possess the same type of intellect as man, is still controversial.
Koehler answers it in the affirmative, others in the negative. But however this
problem may be solved by future investigations, one thing is already clear: In
the animal world, the path toward humanlike intellect is not the same as the
path toward humanlike speech; thought and speech do not spring from one root.
Even those who would deny intellect to chimpanzees cannot deny that the
apes possess something approaching intellect, that the highest type of habit
formation they manifest is embryonic intellect. Their use of tools prefigures
human behavior. To Marxists, Koehler’s discoveries do not come as a surprise.
Marx said long ago that the use and the creation of implements of labor,
although present in embryonic form in some species of animals, are a specific
characteristic of the human process of labor. The thesis that the roots of
human intellect reach down into the animal realm has long been admitted by
Marxism; we find its elaboration in Plekhanov [34, p. 138]. Engels wrote that
man and animals have all forms of intellectual activity in common; only the
developmental level differs: Animals are able to reason on an elementary level,
to analyze (cracking a nut is a beginning of analysis), to experiment when
confronted with problems or caught in a difficult situation. Some, e.g. the
parrot, not only can learn to speak but can apply words meaningfully in a
restricted sense: When begging, he will use words for which he will be rewarded
with a tidbit; when teased, he will let loose the choicest invectives in his
vocabulary.
It goes without saying that Engels does not credit animals with the
ability to think and to speak on the human level, but we need not at this point
elaborate on the exact meaning of his statement. Here we merely wish to
establish that there are no good reasons to deny the presence in animals of
embryonic thought and language of the same type as man’s, which develop, again
as in man, along separate paths.’ An animal’s ability to express himself
vocally is no indication of his mental development.
Let us now summarize the relevant data yielded by recent studies of
children. We find that in the child, too, the roots and the developmental
course of the intellect differ from those of speech – that initially thought is
nonverbal and speech nonintellectual. Stern asserts that at a certain point the
two lines of development meet, speech becoming rational and thought verbal. The
child “discovers” that “each thing has its name,” and begins to ask what each
object is called.
Some psychologists do not agree with Stern that this first “age of
questions” occurs universally and is necessarily symptomatic of any momentous
discovery. Koffka takes a stand between Stern’s and that of his opponents. Like
Buehler, he emphasizes the analogy between the chimpanzee’s invention of tools
and the child’s discovery of the naming function of language, but the scope of
this discovery, according to him, is not as wide as Stern assumed. The word, in
Koffka’s view, becomes a part of the structure of the object on equal terms
with its other parts. For a time, it is to the child not a sign but merely one
of the properties of the object, which has to be supplied to make the structure
complete. As Buehler pointed out, each new object presents the child with a
problem situation, and he solves the problem uniformly by naming the object. When
he lacks the word for the new object, he demands it from adults [7, p. 54].
We believe that this view comes closest to the truth. The data on
children’s language (supported by anthropological data) strongly suggest that
for a long time the word is to the child a property, rather than the symbol, of
the object; that the child grasps the external structure word-object earlier
than the inner symbolic structure. We choose this “middle” hypothesis among the
several offered’ because we find it hard to believe, on the basis of available
data, that a child of eighteen months to two years is able to “discover” the
symbolic function of speech. This occurs later, and not suddenly but gradually,
through a series of “molecular” changes. The hypothesis we prefer fits in with
the general pattern of development in mastering signs which we outlined in the
preceding section. Even in a child of school age, the functional use of a new
sign is preceded by a period of mastering the external structure of the sign.
Correspondingly, only in the process of operating with words first conceived as
properties of objects does the child discover and consolidate their function as
signs.
Thus, Stern’s thesis of “discovery” calls for reappraisal and
limitation. Its basic tenet, however, remains valid: It is clear that
ontogenetically thought and speech develop along separate lines and that at a
certain point these lines meet. This important fact is now definitely
established, no matter how further studies may settle the details on which psychologists
still disagree: whether this meeting occurs at one point or at several points,
as a truly sudden discovery or after long preparation through practical use and
slow functional change, and whether it takes place at the age of two or at
school age.
We shall now summarize our investigation of inner speech. Here, too, we
considered several hypotheses, and we came to the conclusion that inner speech
develops through a slow accumulation of functional and structural changes, that
it branches off from the child’s external speech simultaneously with the
differentiation of the social and the egocentric functions of speech, and
finally that the speech structures mastered by the child become the basic
structures of his thinking.
This brings us to another indisputable fact of great importance.
Thought development is determined by language, i.e., by the linguistic tools of
thought and by the socio-cultural experience of the child. Essentially, the
development of inner speech depends on outside factors; the development of
logic in the child, as Piaget’s studies have shown, is a direct function of his
socialized speech. The child’s intellectual growth is contingent on his
mastering the social means of thought, that is, language.
We can now formulate the main conclusions to be drawn from our
analysis. If we compare the early development of speech and of intellect –
which, as we have seen, develop along separate lines both in animals and in
very young children – with the development of inner speech and of verbal thought,
we must conclude that the later stage is not a simple continuation of the
earlier. The nature of the development itself
changes, from
biological to socio-historical. Verbal thought is not an innate, natural form
of behavior but is determined by a historical-cultural process and has specific
properties and laws that cannot be found in the natural forms of thought and
speech. Once we acknowledge the historical character of verbal thought, we must
consider it subject to all the premises of historical materialism, which are
valid for any historical phenomenon in human society. It is only to be expected
that on this level the development of behavior will be governed essentially by
the general laws of the historical development of human society.
The problem of thought and language thus extends beyond the limits of
natural science and becomes the focal problem of historical human psychology,
i.e., of social psychology. Consequently, it must be posed in a different way.
This second problem presented by the study of thought and speech will be the
subject of a separate investigation.
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