[Xmca-l] Re: the genetic roots of thought and speech

[larry smolucha]

Message from Francine:

This reminds me of a debate that I had with Greg Thompson over a year ago
about hearing impaired people  who do not have speech
but use hand sign language. Hand sign language is a sensori-motor semiotic
systems that communicates thoughts to others. This is a semiotic fusion that
does not involve speech. Dance is another sensori-motor fusion with thought
(which is itself based on sensori-motor experience). Visual symbols systems 
are another.

My reading of Vygotsky is that only speech vocalizations that fuse with thought
(based on sensori-motor experience) can produce 'word' meanings that are internalized
as the inner speech that creates higher mental functions (consciously regulated
thought processes).

> Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 09:54:14 -0800
> From: lpscholar2@gmail.com
> To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
> Subject: [Xmca-l]  the genetic roots of thought and speech
> 
> Francine asked us to re-read Chapter 4 "the Genetic Roots' of Thought and
> Speech.
> This paragraph was critical
> 
> "we are 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 indirectly by the processes of verbal thought"
> [Vygotsky, page 48]
> 
> Reading this opens for me the question of all the other functions of speech
> in the adult that are not directly influenced by thought and all the
> functions of thought that are not affected by speech.
> In particular are there forms of *imaging* that are thoughts but not
> functioning in speech. Do these paths of image and thought also develop and
> fuse?
> 
> All the functions that Vygotsky explores in the primates and in children
> PRIOR to the reciprocal interweaving of thought and language continue to
> function in adults. For example the sounds of speech as offering "release
> from tension or anxiety" or the sounds as ways of *connecting* and
> *bonding*.
> It seems that to privilege the fusion of thought and language as dominant
> modes of designing places/spaces [such as the third space] makes the other
> functions [speech alone] [thought alone] nondominant modes when the
> necessity for connection may be prior to and dominant when reflecting on
> the fused mode of thought and language as a partial unity.
> In other words, the unit of analysis is the relation of thought alone AND
> speech alone AND image alone AND all their actual fusions as other partial
> modes.
> This as a multi-modal understanding.
> I hope this is the right length
> Larry