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5.language and Thought

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24 views3 pages

5.language and Thought

Uploaded by

mechairiaouassim
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Language and Thought

Introduction

The relationship between language and thought is one of the most exciting and challenging

issues in psychology. The history of this phenomenon can be traced back to the works of early

mentalistic psychologists, philosophers and linguists. Currently, the new science of cognition

has revised the debate on this issue, mainly due to the contribution of the following

investigations:

1. Piaget Theory of Cognitive Development.


Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist that was famous for his four stages of cognitive

development for children, which included the development of language. However, children do

not think like adults and so before they can begin to develop language they must first actively

construct their own understanding of the world through their interactions with their

environment. A child has to understand a concept before he or she can acquire the particular

language which expresses that concept. For example, a child first becomes aware of a concept

such as relative size and only afterward do they acquire the words and patterns to convey that

concept. Essentially it is impossible for a young child to voice concepts that are unknown to

them and therefore once a child learns about their environment then they can map language

into their prior experience. Language is only one of the many human mental or cognitive

activities and many cognitivists believe that language emerges within the context of other

general cognitive abilities like memory, attention and problem solving because it is a part of

their broader intellectual development. However, once language emerges, it is usually within

certain stages and children go through these stages in a fixed order that is universal in all

children. There is a consistent order of mastery of the most common function morphemes in a

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language and simple ideas are expressed earlier than more complex ones even if they are more

grammatically complicated. Piaget's cognitive theory states that, children's language reflects

the development of their logical thinking and reasoning skills in stages, with each period

having a specific name and age reference. There are four stages of Piaget's cognitive

development theory, each involving a different aspect of language acquisition:

1. Sensory-Motor Period: (birth to 2 years) Children are born with "action schemas" to

"assimilate" information about the world such as sucking or grasping. During the

sensory-motor period, children's language is "egocentric" and they talk either for

themselves or for the pleasure of associating anyone who happens to be there with the

activity of the moment

2. Pre-Operational Period:(2 years to 7) Children's language makes rapid progress and

the development of there "mental schema" lets them quickly "accommodate" new

words and situations. Children's language becomes "symbolic" allowing them to talk

beyond the "here and now" and to talk about things such as the past, future and

feelings.

3. Concrete Operation: (7 to 11 years) It involves "animism" which refers to young

children's tendency to consider everything, including inanimate objects, as being alive.

Language is considered egocentric because they see things purely from their own

perspective.

4. Formal Operation: (11 years to15) Piaget divides this period into two parts: the

period of concrete operations and the period of formal operations. Language at this

stage reveals the movement of their thinking from immature to mature and from

illogical to logical. They are also able to "de-center" or view things from a perspective

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other than their own. It is at this point that children's language becomes "socialized"

and includes things such as questions, answers, commands and criticisms.

2. Vygotsk’s Theory of Interrelation of Thought and Speech

According to him the relationship between language and thought is very sophisticated.

He claims that the genetic roots of thought and speech are different, and the interrelationship

of thought and speech is ever-dynamic, undergoing various changes:

Progress in thought and progress in speech are not parallel. Their two growth curves

cross and re-cross. They may straighten out and run side by side, ever merge for a time, but

they always diverge again.

Nevertheless, Vygotsky does not mean that thought and language are separate. He claims that

the earlier investigation was largely due to the fact that thought and language were assumed to

be independent with verbal thought as the result of their external unification. The approach

that Vygotsky proposes is based on the analysis of the phenomena not by separation and

analysis of them by elements, but via analysis of units which were chosen to be verbal thought

in word meaning: The meaning of a word represents such a close amalgam of thought and

language that is hard to tell whether it is a phenomenon of speech or phenomenon of

thought.

Indeed, Vygotsgy distinguishes between two types of speech:

1. External Speech: Turning thought into speech.

2. Internal Speech: Speech inward thought

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