Anytime I am wavering in the wind of indecission about how to place order
to the jumbled world of psychology I return to Vygotsky's "Thought and
Language"
Page 212 of the 1999 Kozulin edition:
"The meaning of a word represents such a close amalgam of thought and
language that it is hard to tell whether it is a phenomenon of speech or a
phenomenon of thought. A word without meaning is an empty sound; meaning,
therefore, is a criterion of "word," iots indispensable component. It
would seem, then, that it may be regarded as a phenomenon of speech. But
from the point of view of psychology,, the meaning of every word is a
generalization or a concept. And since generalizations and concepts are
undeniably acts of thought, we may regard meaning as a phenomenon of
thinking. It does not follow, however, that meaning formally belongs in
two different spheres of psychic life. WORD MEANING IS A PHENOMENON OF
THOUGHT ONLY INSOFAR AS THOUGHT IS EMBODIED IN SPEECH, AND OF SPEECH ONLY
INSOFAR AS SPEECH IS CONNECTED WITH THOUGHT AND ILLUMINATED BY IT. It is a
phenomenon of verbal thought, or meaningul speech - a union of word and
thought."
At a young age many verbalizations and gestures are tested and retested,
some for fun and some with a purpose. Fun in this sense is to mean the
fancy of hearing a sound come from the mouth (i.e. the "aaaaaaaaaaaaaa"
noise made if holding your breath and slowly forcing an "a" sound through
your larynx). Vygotsky dismisses the old school thought that words are
associated with meaning and instead takes a Gestaltian type approach to
state that meaning is the union of thought and speech. However, Vygotsky
views the development of speech and the development of thought as taking
place separately. A child can present vast information (i.e. memorized
play dialogue) without grasping the thought behind the language. For this
reason it is extremely difficult to measure the development of a child's
thought process. This is why I believe Valsiner's ideas regarding process
structure of semiotic mediation to be an extremely important idea. It is a
tool that practitioners may use to help measure a person's thoughts. To
ascertain that a person's certain words have hierarchical hold upon a
person's ability to track social settings (including work, school, etc.)
could possibly provide evidence of a person developing slef-regulatory
processes. Maybe?
eric
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