ACADEMY OF SCIENCES USSR INSTITUTE OF LINGUISTICS N.I.Zhinkin SPEECH AS A CONDUCTOR OF INFORMATION PUBLISHING HOUSE “SCIENCE” MOSCOW 1982 The monograph is devoted to the study of the internal mechanisms of speech, considered within the framework of a single self-regulatory system formed by the interaction of language, speech, intellect, in the process of communication. Responsible editors: Doctor of Technical Sciences R.T. KOTOV, Candidate of Psychological Sciences A.I. NOVIKOV 4602000000 - 073,<>ы ^ l ® Publishing House "Nauka", 042@2)^82 Ш" 82* RH- 1 19 "2 PREFACE Nikolai Ivanovich Zhinkpn A893-1979) - one of the prominent Soviet psychologists, Doctor of Psychological Sciences, Professor, specialist in the field of psychology of speech and thinking. The significance of the works of N* I* Zhinkiia is not limited to the framework of psychology. 6 They are equally of interest for linguistics, especially for such areas as psycholinguistics, text linguistics, applied linguistics, etc. * Scientific interests of N , I. Zhiikin were vast and diverse. He was interested in a wide range of problems, diverse topics. But the central, core theme of his work, to which he remained faithful until the end of his life, was the speech of a person in relation to language, on the one hand, and with thinking, on the other hand. The results of his many years of research in this direction were reflected in the fundamental work “Mechanisms of Speech.”1 The book contains extensive factual material on the psychology and psychophysiology of speech, broad generalizations of the patterns of speech activity, the general theory of speech mechanisms - all this determined the high appreciation that this work immediately received both in our country and abroad. It laid the foundations for the study of the semantic side of speech” and its semantics, which became the dominant direction in the further work of N. I. Zhinkin. The logic of the development of research in the field of speech leads N. I. Zhinktsha to the problem of text as the central link where the interaction of language and thinking occurs. The first major work devoted to the text was his article “Development of written speech of students III-VII i Zhinkin V.I. Mechanisms of speech, M., 1958. classes”2, which not only provided an analysis school essays , written from the picture, but also contained a deep theoretical understanding of the process of generating a text, its perception and understanding, as a result of which a whole set of ideas was formulated that had a noticeable influence on many researchers working in this direction. Particularly fruitful was the idea that the text is a multi-level hierarchically organized whole, where the central place is occupied by the hierarchy of predicates distributed in a certain way throughout the text.” From the position that all elements of the text are interconnected, an important methodological conclusion followed: a single word or a sentence cannot be an element of analysis. It can be understood in the universal connection of all elements within the whole text. Therefore, of paramount importance when analyzing a text is the establishment of connections between elements, on the basis of which the analysis of the elements themselves is possible. Also important are the conclusions about the role of the order and place of sentences for the organization of internal connections of the text, made by N. I. Zhishshny as a result of an analysis of the process of selection and distribution of words in the text, the distribution of subject features in a sentence and group of sentences. The main significance of this work, in our opinion, lies in the fact that here, in essence, for the first time, the task of studying the text as a whole, as an independent unit of linguistic and psychological analysis, was not only posed, but also realized. Here the problems that became the subject of research in text linguistics, which began to develop intensively in our country in the mid-60s, were considered. In the subsequent works of N.I. Zhinkin, a number of fundamental ideas are put forward that played a significant role in the development of Soviet psycholinguistics. This primarily includes the position that all speech processes must be considered not in themselves, but in a communicative act. Only taking into account the conditions of speech communication, its goals and objectives makes it possible to fully understand in depth the nature of the speech process and the text in particular. As a psychologist N.I. Zhinkin * Zhinkii V. if. Development of written speech of students in grades III-VII.- Izv. APN RSFSR, 1956, No. 78/ called for studying the person speaking, i.e., not tearing the person away from speech. Turning to linguistics, he calls not to separate speech from the person. He believed that it is necessary to study language and speech in inextricable connection with the process of communication between people. A special work is devoted to the problem of communication, but N.I. Zhibkin touches on this topic to one degree or another in almost all his articles. A special place in the works of N. and I. Zhiakin is occupied by the problem of encoding and decoding information in human thinking in the process of generating, perceiving and understanding speech messages. The most famous is his article “On code transitions in internal speech,” which addresses the question of “is thinking realized only in the speech motor code or is there another code that is not directly related to the forms of natural language?”4. To solve this issue, the technique of central speech interference was used, which makes it possible to inhibit speech movements in the process of internal speech, which, according to the author, is the central link in the processing of verbal messages and the area of code transitions. The results of the experiment confirmed the hypothesis about the possibility of non-verbal thinking when there is a transition to a special code of internal speech, called by the author “subject-schematic code*. N. Y. Zhinkii characterizes this code as unpronounceable, in which there are no material signs of words in a natural language, and where the denoted is at the same time a sign. The conclusion about the existence of a special code of internal speech and the possibility of non-verbal thinking is especially relevant 8 Zhikkin N, I. Four communication systems and four languages. - In the book: Theoretical problems of applied linguistics, Moscow State University, Sh5, pp. 7-38. See also: Zhinkin I.I. Some provisions for constructing a communicative model of a person. - B book: Basic approaches to modeling the psyche and heuristic programming. Proceedings of the symposium. M., 1968, p. 177-187; It's him. Semiotic problems of communication between animals and humans.-In the book: Theoretical and experimental research in the field of structural and applied linguistics. Moscow State University, 1973, p. 60-67. 4 Zhipkip Ya. L. On code transitions in internal speech, - VYa, 1964, No. 6, p. 26, C. also: Shchinkin Ya. I. Internal codes of language and external codes of speech. - In honor Roman Jacobson. Paris, 1967. 5". Currently, in connection with the discussion about verbality - nonverbality of thinking5. Issues related to determining the laws of understanding and generation of text are constantly in the focus of attention of N. I. Zhinkin. He repeatedly returns to them in in his various works. He examines in particular detail the process of selecting text elements and the restrictions imposed by the intellect on this process. N. I. Zhinkin believes that selection is that universal operation that goes through the entire chain of links in the speech mechanism - from speech sound to thoughts. B In connection with this, he is not limited to the analysis of word selection, but considers all levels of the text. They put forward the hypothesis that words are not stored in memory in their full form. Their elements are stored in a certain way, organized in the form of a “phoneme lattice” and “morpheme lattice,” from which, according to certain rules, the full form of the word is removed at the moment of selection when constructing a message. Composing words from sounds is the first level of selection. The second level is composing a message from words. Special semantic rules apply here, which do not relate either to the sound composition of the word or to the syntactic connection of words, but only to the meanings of words on the basis of which their compatibility is carried out. These rules serve as a kind of filter, allowing only meaningful linguistic expressions to enter the intellect. In the concept of text generation, created by N. I. Zhinkin, the central place is occupied by the idea of a plan that predicts the beginning and end of a future text, of a hierarchy of subtopics and subsubtopics that define the necessary levels of development of a plan into a text, and thereby its structure. These intellectual formations that arise before the text are the main means of limitation imposed on the process 8 Serebrennikov B.A. Language and thinking. - In the book: Russian language. Encyclopedia. M., 1979, p. 413. 6 Zhinkin N.I. Study of internal speech using the method of central speech interference.-Izv. APN RSFSR, 1960t L&IZ. See also: Zhinkin N.I., Grammar and meaning. - In the book: Language and man. Moscow State University, 1970; Aka. Intelligence, language and speech. - In the book: Speech impairment in preschool children. M., 1972 ; Aka. Sensory abstraction. - In the book; Problems of general, developmental in educational psychology. M., 1979, pp. 38-59. 6 selection of text elements, since from the very beginning they outline the subject-thematic area of the message and thereby narrow the scope of the search for the necessary linguistic means. At the same time, the selection is significantly influenced by the orientation towards the real or intended communication partner. In connection with this, the author, as a rule, does not reproduce all the necessary links in the development of the plan, assuming that they will restored by the communication partner on the basis of the necessary knowledge formed in his intellect and his experience.As a result, “semantic holes” appear in the text, the elimination of which in the process of understanding the text is possible only as a result of updating the necessary knowledge about reality. Considering the process of perception and understanding of a text, N. I. Zhinkin constantly addresses the problem of the relationship between grammar and semantics, the relationship between meaning and meaning, the semantic structure of the text, levels of information collapse, etc. Characterizing N. I. Zhinkin’s concept as a whole, it should first of all be noted that the main feature of his approach to the study of speech and language phenomena should be considered integrity and complexity. Clearly distinguishing between language and speech, even contrasting speech with language, N. I. Zhinkin at the same time did not separate these two phenomena, exploring them in dialectical unity, in interconnection and interaction. He believed that speech is a mechanism for generating and understanding messages. Since this mechanism is based primarily on psychological and intellectual patterns, the speech process has its own peculiarities of structure and functioning. Language as a means of realizing the speech process is an independent system with its own structure. But the functioning of language is inextricably linked with speech, since speech is the sphere of its use. Therefore, it is impossible, as N.I. Zhinkin believed, to sufficiently adequately and affectively study language in isolation from speech. Only in the living process of speech is it possible to understand such phenomena as polysemy, synonymy, meaning, significance, etc., which are usually entirely attributed to the sphere of language. At the same time, the patterns of the speech process cannot be studied in isolation from language, since there is no speech without the means that realize it in the process of communication. For N.I. Zhinkin, this approach was not just a theoretical premise. He found his realization in almost all of his works, which was reflected even in the structure and composition of his articles, often quite unusual and original. Thus, speaking, for example, about the semantics of a text, he immediately turns to the phonetics of morphology, and when speaking about the phoneme, he can directly move on to the problem of meaning, meaning, etc. For him, those “partitions” that had developed did not exist in linguistics between individual disciplines reflecting different levels of language - phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, etc. For him, all this is a holistic formation, functioning in inextricable unity and interaction. This approach is of particular relevance for applied linguistics, which is explained by the following circumstances. Applied linguistics includes a fairly wide range of problems; aimed at solving various kinds of practical problems. But the main, most significant at present, can be considered, are the tasks associated with the automation of intellectual processes occurring in information systems for various purposes, systems: machine translation, etc. n. For many modern automated information systems, it is characteristic that the main object of processing and storage is text. To an even greater extent, the text acts as an object of processing in automatic indexing, annotation, abstracting systems, where it is subjected to various transformations for the purpose of collapsing Machine translation systems also process text presented in natural language. At the same time, it undergoes complex transformations both at the grammatical and semantic levels. The construction of non-formational languages is largely associated with text analysis. For example, descriptor FL are entirely based on extracting “key words” and “descriptors” from texts, which involves relying on the content of the text, its meaning to determine the degree of materiality and significance of elements isolated from the text as units of FL. In this regard, it should be considered that, in theoretical terms, one of the central tasks of applied linguistics should be the study of the text as a verbal and mental work, which should also determine the appropriate approach to linguistic phenomena in the development of the necessary means of formalization. Meanwhile, as the history of applied linguistics shows, this circumstance was ignored: in systems dealing with texts, linguistic phenomena were modeled without taking into account the patterns of structure and functioning of the text as a whole. 6 to a certain extent, this is precisely what can explain the failures that occurred in solving, for example, the problem of machine translation." Currently, text research is carried out by various disciplines, but each of them identifies its own aspects in this problem. None of them studies the text from the point of view of formalization, which should be within the competence of applied linguistics. Aspects of formalization include a fairly wide range of issues, including those that are dealt with by psycholinguistics and text linguistics. That is why the concept of N. I. Zhinkin, his A complex approach , linking all aspects of the text problem into a single whole, are of such interest for applied linguistics. It seems to us that N.I. Zhinkin’s concept, which reveals the internal mechanisms of speech, is the platform on which a theory of modern applied linguistics can be formed, taking into account both today’s and future tasks. In this regard, N. I. Zhinkin’s monograph “Speech as a Conductor of Information” is of great importance, which is a kind of result of his scientific activity, a generalization of his previous works. It is devoted to a wide range of problems related to the study of the interaction between three codes that have developed under the influence of communication needs into a single self-regulating system - language, speech, intellect, as well as with the central element of this interaction - inner speech. N, I. Zhinkpn calls internal speech a mixed, or universal, subject code (UPC), which is “a mediator not only between language and intellect, between oral and written speech, but also 7 A similar point of view is contained in the work of: Zeegintsev V, A , The distinction between language and speech as an expression of the duality of the object of linguistics, - In the quarter: Language and speech. Tbilisi" 1979. between national languages." The concept of a universal subject code in this monograph is one of the fundamental ones and runs through the entire work as its core element. Another such concept is the concept of integration, based “on the idea of the integrity of the perception of speech formations, starting from the level of morphemes and ending with the level of the whole text. The idea of integration as a universal process that takes place in the perception and generation of speech formations of any level, in to a certain extent determines the structure of this monograph. Its first sections examine various aspects of the phoneme as the basic material unit of audible speech, as well as phonemic integration. Then the author proceeds to the study of the grammatical space, which he calls the “two-word model,” where lexical integration occurs. Next the integration stage is considered at the level of the whole text. Here, special attention is paid to the problem of understanding the linguistic units functioning in the text, the nature of meaning, the relationship between grammar and semantics, etc. are explored. Successfully using the logical theory of G. Frege and developing it on the basis of psychological materials, N. I. Zhinkin comes to the conclusion that the meaning of a message has a dual nature: it is born on the verge of linguistic meanings and their psychological interpretation in specific topics of communication. From here, the author draws an important conclusion about the creative nature of speech formation and expression of the meaning of a message by restructuring the ensemble of lexical meanings in the text. We can assume that the main focus of this work is to create a theory of text and its application in solving various practical problems in linguistics and psychology. In this regard, the book by N. I. Zhinkpn will be useful for a wide range of specialists involved in both theoretical problems of language, speech and thinking, and applied problems. In the process of preparing the manuscript for publication, since it did not undergo final author editing, the editors made some changes and 10" clarifications. They relate mainly to the title of the work and its structure. Initially, the manuscript was titled “Speech as a conductor of information that optimizes the work of the intellect.” ". "This title was abbreviated. In the original, the work was divided into twelve independent sections without division into chapters. In order to better perceive the content, the editors found it possible to group these sections into three chapters, each of which in meaning corresponds to an independent fragment of content. In this case, all the names of the sections were taken from the original text. The section “Intonation” that completed the work was not included in the monograph due to its incompleteness. The editors express gratitude to the head of the laboratory of thinking in memory of the Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR, Doctor of Psychological Sciences A. HL Sokolov and Candidate of Psychological Sciences G D. Chistyakova, who provided great assistance in preparing the manuscript for publication, R. G. Kotov, A. I. Novikov / INTRODUCTORY REMARKS 0 t The problem of language and speech over the past 20-30 years has begun to attract increasing attention from acousticians, linguists, and physiologists , psychologists and cybernetics. This is probably explained by the fact that in the future it has become possible to find ways to form more optimal verbal communication between people and, in particular, to use computers for this. The step taken in this direction relatively recently turned out to be effective: now computers can be equipped with a display. A person writes a text on a typewriter and receives an answer also in letter form. However, the problem of machine recognition of spoken speech is still far from being solved. It would seem that the difference between oral and written speech is small. In one case, language units are realized in letters, in another case - in sounds. All you have to do is replace the letters with speech sounds, and the machine will accept spoken speech. But sounds and letters are part of a system that is structurally different in sound and letter implementation, and it is not so easy to discover the nature of this difference. JL A. Chistovik wrote very convincingly on this issue: “Multiple attempts to solve this problem have so far not led *to the desired results”1. One of the reasons lies in those primitive ideas about the structure of the speech process,” continues L. A. Chistovich, from which engineers involved in automatic recognition proceeded. They assumed that the speech stream could be divided into sections that correspond well to certain phonemes. Further research carried out at the school of L. A. Chistovich, as well as by other scientists, showed that the problem is much more complicated than it initially seems, and the point here is not only in the primitive ideas of engineers. It should be recognized that theoretical and ex- Chistovich L.A. Speech, articulation and perception, L., 1965, p. 8, 12 neither linguists, nor physiologists, nor psychologists, nor acousticians yet have scientifically substantiated provisions about the peculiarities of the process of human speech perception, sufficient for constructing a working model. At present,1 there are only tests of machine speech recognition “with a limited vocabulary, spoken in the voice of a certain speaker who has mastered a certain diction. These facts only confirm the complexity of the problem, which is revealed when comparing written and spoken speech. Studying language and speech, at every step we encounter, on the one hand, contradictory provisions and, on the other hand, the complementarity of these provisions, i.e. ©. with their interchangeability and semiotic identity in a pair. Written speech is determined by space, and spoken language by time. This sensory inconsistency is reflected in speech units as semiotic signals. Space is static, the signs by which things are identified from a certain perspective are constant, as are the spatial forms of a thing. Things themselves are not signs, but can become objects of semlosis. Speech sounds are dynamic and are realized over time. They vary depending on the function of linguistic units. They vary in form and duration, entering different environments. And at the same time they are like component of a certain word are self-identical. This is why changing speech sounds can be replaced by unchanging letters. This is where their complementarity is manifested - in the semiotic aspect, the phoneme is identical to the letter. However, the sound dynamics of a phoneme, when performing its sign function, imposes strict and subtle requirements on the method of implementation. The output of a sound dynamic unit at the normalized threshold of discrimination either requires a special interpretation on the part of the partner, or threatens to disrupt communication to one degree or another as an interference. * Complementarity is also found in the fact that without oral speech, written speech could not appear, and without written speech, oral speech could not improve communication, since there would not be enough memory to preserve the information found by humanity, which must be recorded in writing "and all the time save. All that has been said, of course, is reflected in the processes of speech perception. As can be seen, the flow of sounds and lines of written words are extremely different phenomena. That is why the display is already working, and oral conversation with the machine awaits a more accurate theory of language and speech. These cursory remarks about oral and written speech were intended to show that the processes of perception, understanding and speech memory have really been studied very little, and that we often pass by obvious and well-known facts without giving them significant significance. , one can notice trivial and at the same time fundamental phenomena: Oral speech is realized in syllables, since this is a special motor device of a person, the brain control of which begins to be fine-tuned before the sound appears on the lips. Syllable movements appear even in children1 who are deaf from birth. Meanwhile, monkeys, whose vocal apparatus is very similar to humans, can scream, but are not capable of syllable division and merging. Oddly enough, canaries can quite clearly pronounce several words that are quite understandable to human hearing (the author heard a similar recording on a record). And small white parrots can even compose syllables as endearing emotional reactions. We will consider this problem specifically in the future. Systematic and meaningful use of syllables is only accessible to humans. Oral speech without syllable formation is impossible. In written speech, syllables are not represented, because they are pronounced, without the image of winter. No lines along the course of letters can reflect expressive syllabic mergers and transitions, and this is not necessary, since when reading loudly, syllables will arise automatically and will obey the stereotypes developed in childhood and cortical control according to the interpretation of the text being read. When reading to oneself in inner speech, syllable formation can either help the understanding of a complex text when it is necessary to reread what has been written, or simply slow down the reading of a relatively easy text. But this is a special problem that cannot be explained here. The main conclusion that follows from the above is that in speech dynamics we encounter three types of sign units: discrete units (letters), continuous units (phonemes in 14 syllables) and mixed units. These are three types of transition of units from languages to the dynamics of speech. They can be called codes - 1) discrete, 2) continuous, or iconic, and 3) mixed. These codes are determined by the human device; the intellect receives information about the environment through analyzers. But even if its volume were limited to this, such a creature could. adapt to reality, without changing it according to the laws of nature4^ to your plans. Such special processing of incoming information is necessary that would not only correspond to the sensory appearance of perceived things, but would also cognize their connections and patterns of formation. This means that ha vdschzd&bsh. Invisible, but really operating, subject connections and relationships were discovered, the management of which could be realized in the actions of people for the optimal reorganization of things. Such work corresponds to the functions of intelligence only if incoming information is transformed and internal processing and conclusions are provided with the necessary feedback chain. Transformation of incoming information is necessary so that invisible and generally sensory changeable components of information are marked as unchanged. And in order to find such components, you need to install their functions by feedback , Transforming an incoming sensory signal into an unchangeable one is tantamount to considering it as a sign, and changing this sign - as the value of the function that it performs under given conditions. Thus, in the word city, a change from a voiced d to a voiceless t means “the end of the word,” and changes in inflections mean “grammatical changes in cases*, etc. The feedback is that a certain sign, falling into the given conditions, changes and takes on new meaning. In other words, the sign remains the same, but its grammatical meaning changes, thereby verifying its identity and stable iconicity. It is important to emphasize that when repeating the operation, the results cannot go beyond the boundaries of relevance. Sign transformations in different units of language form a paradigmatics, which presupposes the presence of a certain number of words as material for systemic “structuralization.” Paradigmatics is superimposed on syntagmatics and, as it were, slides along it, forming a dynamic sign system. The words on which the paradigmatics is superimposed are quasi-words, i.e. formal formations such as the JL/B example. Shcherba “Glokaya kuzdra*. The resulting structure "has a fundamental property - it is a universal subject code. This suggests that in the work of this dynamic mechanism in any human language, a semiotic transformation of sensory signals into a subject structure occurs, i.e., a denotative reflection of reality. The formal unity of this mechanism ensures potential possibility of mutual understanding between partners and indicates the hereditary characteristics of the human brain. Mastering the vocabulary of a national language provides the possibility of deep mutual understanding. Of course, national languages can differ not only in vocabulary, but also in paradigmatics and syntagmatics. However, in this case, we mean the formal structure mechanism when the same subject relation can be signified in any: different ways and retain meaning. It is the subject matter of the code that ensures mutual understanding and translation of human languages. What we called the universal subject code (UCC)" is usually called the hierarchy of linguistic units. This is due to the fact that semiotic transformation must occur in each component of a complex dynamic code. If this is so, then serious difficulties may arise in explaining the entire mechanism of speech reception. It is noticeable to everyone that speech is received as speech units arrive, and* the speed of their change occurs in the range of 0.1-0.2 seconds. Such a speed,” writes the prominent physiologist P. Milner, “of information input during normal speech is very high, much higher than the speed with which the nervous system can under normal conditions process sequentially arriving signals”2. A. Liberman and his colleagues: tried to solve this problem, pointing out that when receiving speech, parallel transmission occurs through several nerve channels, which is how high-speed information processing is achieved. However, these and other attempts to resolve the issue that arose were not sufficiently clear * 2 Milner I, Physiological Psychology. M., 1073, with 308. 16 active. P. Milner notes: “The question of how sounds are decoded when they are received remains completely open”3. We considered it necessary to briefly dwell on the problem of speech decoding speed in the introductory remarks section because when describing the mechanism of the speech process, one should take into account, as noted above, from the very beginning some trivial truths, which, when observing speech phenomena, seem at first paradoxical. The question raised about the speed of speech decoding; at the reception it is solved very simply, if we take into account the well-known provisions on the formation of chains of conditioned reflexes. Foreign speech is not decoded immediately; training is necessary, which must be continued until the speed of reception matches the speed of speech arrival. A skill is a chain of conditioned reflexes that are easily automated. If you are given an address in an unfamiliar city, you move very slowly the first time in order to find the street, alley and house you are looking for. But after a while you will be able to correctly and very quickly follow the path that has become familiar. The number of grammatical positions in a language is finite, many of them are repeated several times. By the age of three, a child can already accept speech addressed to him at a natural pace, simply because its elements are familiar to him and he recognizes them instantly. This is the result not only of the established automatism, but also of the design features of the elements themselves. A person perceives speech in the iconic code as a continuous sequence of syllables. As we will see in the next section, the most diverse sound mergers within the syllabic stream are not interference. On the contrary, they link the syllabic flow into a well-recognized whole that has its own meaning. They are recognized as a whole in the same way as any objects. To recognize our friend, we do not need to examine and “identify” his eyes, nose, ears and other components of his face in turn. The noted elementary considerations eloquently indicate that in speech, in any case, words are recognized, and not the sounds from which it is necessary to compose s Ibid., & 309. “HEY. They are words, and the whole sentence is understood, and not the transition from one word to another. A single word is quite rarely and only under certain conditions understood as a sentence (“no”, “okay”, etc.). Together with tech*, each catch always contains a certain (according to the rules) number of phonemes. If we correctly take into account the psychological nature of the perception and understanding of the acoustic appearance of speech, the role of the three types of code in which speech is realized in the process of communication will become clearer. Speech is an action that one partner performs in relation to another to convey thoughts and semantic impact. Of course. ", partners are actively interested in mutual understanding even with different intentions" Putting a thought into a linguistic form is a difficult task because the subject of communication should be new information in a changing situation. However, in all cases it will be necessary to analyze the incoming information element by element and integrate it according to the goal line . We say integration instead of synthesis, as is usually done. Synthesis is carried out from the same final elements to which analysis arrives. But it is possible to change the direction of the connection or its structural rearrangement while maintaining the same elements. Then integration occurs in accordance with the allowed goal. From the same of finite elements, different integrative structures can be built. This is precisely the act that occurs during the semiotic transformation discussed above. A person hears words consisting of sounds: “There’s a dog running,” but at the same time he thinks not about the sounds and words, but about the dog, and looks to see where he is running. Transformation and integration are necessary because the intelligence for which the message is intended does not understand natural language. It has its own special information language. In this language, he builds hypotheses, evidence, draws conclusions, makes decisions, etc. That is why the needs of communication caused the formation of interacting codes that formed into a single system: language - auditory speech - inner speech - intellect. This system is self-regulating and capable of self-improvement. The opposition of two discrete codes to the languages of the intellect gave rise to the sour cream code - inner speech, which should be considered as a universal subject code, 18 which became a mediator not only between language and intellect. and between oral and written speech, but also between national languages." The translatability of any language into any other language is a fundamental property of any language* However, to implement this property, i.e., to master such code transitions" that lead to mutual understanding, special information is required search taking into account those material structures with the help of which generation and reception occurs: speech, . ¦ From what has been said in this introduction, it follows that the hidden mechanism of language-speech can often be discovered from a comparison of simple observations. Briefly speaking, the conclusion to which these observations lead is that in order to understand speech it must be perceived as a single whole, and in order to process the received information it is necessary to decompose this whole into discrete elements. Chapter One PHONEME IN LANGUAGE AND RE The phoneme is audible, visible and pronounced. The concept of the phoneme began to take shape at the end of the last century. A special scientific field - phonology - was formed, and schools arose - Prague, Leningrad, Moscow. The concept of differential features* became of great importance in the study of this topic. I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay, the first Russian phonologist, recalls how much effort he spent to prove how important it is for science to distinguish between letters and phonemes. In terms of the tasks of our work, we should pay attention only to the circumstances under which a person discovers what is on the phoneme. Speech sounds are perceived by humans in a continuous - iconic code. This means that the sensory and sound composition of the speech stream changes all the time, and it is as a result of this that information transmitted to the partner accumulates all the time. No change can be noticed unless there is something that remains constant or changes in a different order of time. Since in speech the sound stream is truly continuous, the phoneme cannot be distinguished accurately enough due to this oversight. In other words, it cannot be heard as special, separate, and yet everyday experience indicates that sounds are distinguishable in the composition of words. Without this, it would be impossible to understand anything in speech at all. They soon came to the conclusion that every thing, including a phoneme, is recognized by its signs. A visually perceived thing is recognized by color, texture, material, size, shape, etc. Speech sounds also differ. That is why the concept of a differential feature, phoneme, has become very important . But a sign cannot be perceived without a bearer to whom it belongs. There is no just redness, Trubetskoy V, S. Fundamentals of fovoloyi. M., 1960. 20 ^whiteness, velvety, softness m t + p. or publicity, consonance, sonority, deafness, etc. The sign of a phoneme is some part of the phoneme itself, inseparable from it, which will then go into the neighboring phoneme. It is especially important to emphasize that the differential feature cannot be pronounced separately from the phoneme itself.” This is a phenomenon distinguished by hearing and only hearing from the syllabic composition of words of speech. That is why, to study the composition of phonemes and their pronunciation in different languages, primarily the auditory method is used. By studying the sound composition of different languages and dialects, phoneticians accumulate auditory experience, which can be reflected in a special, fairly accurate transcription. In this experience, a special phonemic ability is developed to notice various positional changes in the sound of phonemes. Positional change refers to a change in the sound of a phoneme depending on its place in the systemic stream of speech sounds. It is allowed that a phoneme, while remaining self-identical as a sound unit, can be reduced to varying degrees, or change under the influence of a neighboring phoneme, or change in word form, or simply drop out in the partner’s utterance - all the same, this phoneme will be restored in perception as a unit that is certainly included in a spoken word required by subsequent words. The method of studying phonemes by ear can be considered subjective, which detracts from its scientific nature. meaning * Baudouin de Courtenay really recognized the psychological reality of the phoneme, which caused reproaches regarding his theory as psychological, that is, subjective. And in our time, an attempt to present the segmentation of phonemes in the flow of speech on the basis of an intuitive approach is recognized as doubtful. V.V. Innnov, relying on the research of L, A. Chistovich, comes to the conclusion that to describe the primary classification of sounds it is enough to use only the concept an acoustic feature correlated with an articulatory feature. Such features can be attributed to entire, long stretches of speech. The addition of a phoneme is not required to describe these phenomena2. This understanding is fully consistent with the possibilities of a scientific, instrumental description for the primary classification* Ivanov V. B., Theory of phonological distinctive features, - In the book: New in Linguistics, Vya, II. M., 1962, p. 166, 167. 21 tions of speech sounds. Vowels can be described in terms of frequencies, and noisy consonants in terms of temporal variation in the spectrum. But to recognize sounds, it is necessary to take into account both frequency and time characteristics. Thus, it should be recognized that the human hearing system has a device that operates in two stages. At the first stage, primary decisions are made about the frequency and time characteristics of sounds where they will be detected. At the second stage, based on the accumulated primary decisions, a final decision is made. Since pronounced sounds are correlative to articulatory movements, the whole process can be described in terms of speech motor skills. So, really. for a scientific description of the process of pronouncing and receiving speech, the concepts of phoneme and differential feature are not required. The briefly stated reasoning arose on the basis of the so-called motor theory of speech, which is being developed at the Leningrad school of L> A. Chistovich and in the USA at the school of A. Lieberman. The task of our work does not include a discussion of this theory, but the question of the differential features of phonemes: is so essential for understanding the mechanism of language - speech - intelligence that in this direction it is necessary to pay attention to some quite obvious, but unexplained facts. First of all, it should be noted that The above discussion about the acoustic reception of speech is not based on the facts of direct human perception, since it is subjective and insufficient to clarify the mechanism of auditory perception. That is why it is necessary to build, as they say, a construct in the form of two stages of different solutions. Despite this, one should still ask whether a person distinguishes between the sounds that he hears in speech? This question, of course, will have a positive answer. If a person did not distinguish the sounds of speech directed towards him, he himself would not learn to speak. It is impossible to control articulation without once checking that k is obtained in one case or another. To a more detailed question about what exactly, according to the laws of hearing and according to the rules of information processing, a person should hear before perceiving at least two sounds, the most accurate answer will be given to us by a child of about two years of age. This issue will be given a special section in the future. 22 but even now it should be said about what should be taken into account when processing speech information at different levels. The facts that are meant are generally known and are described very simply. This is the period of humming - the child pronounces the syllables da-ba-da, boo-bu-bu, ba-a, a-za, etc. In order to repeat these syllables, you need to store their components in memory. In the above case there are two of them - two phonemes. They do not mean anything and are not even addressed to anyone. The child exercises, he plays with himself. Repetition and recognition are feedback needed throughout life, since these sound components underlie the material structure of language. The child hears a differential feature of the phoneme, which always remains unchanged, no matter how the phoneme changes in the word. This is discovered because the change in phonemes occurs systematically, which will be discussed in more detail later* Based on elementary observations of the child’s phonation during a certain period of language acquisition, it is possible to establish without any tools that the child hears, namely hears the differential feature of the phoneme. An adult, of course, also hears these signs, but cannot give himself an account of it. An adult hears the entire phoneme as a component of a syllable and a word, while a child does not understand any words or their combinations, but he pronounces syllables and sometimes reacts to spoken words. Based on all this, we can certainly assert that the child hears the differential feature of the phoneme as an invariant. Usually, the invariant is found on the basis of the processing of options "in the experience of perception. In the case under consideration, the child initially has no experience and no options. Based on self-learning, he himself creates experience for bringing together the different emerging options. The established invariant, adapted to the remaining components of the phoneme, is the result of information processing during the formation of a linguistic sign that has not yet received meaning* This phenomenon should be considered as a universal of human language. Children whose parents speak different languages experience the same phenomena. As a result, a language is formed that is translated into other languages. Thus , trivial, well-known facts lead to the conclusion that the differential features of phonemes are a psychological reality and that they, as stated in phonology, form a certain set of discrete components, which, during perception and pronunciation, merge into a continuous sound stream, flowing into the phoneme. The presence of discreteness is due to the fact that when processing continuous information, it must be divided into components, which, at the output of the response sound, will again merge into a continuous invariant. Therefore, we should talk not about one differential feature, but about a set of them. Moreover, a phoneme cannot really be isolated from a syllable until it is processed and replaced by a letter; it will merge with other phonemes depending on its place in the syllable and word. All this indicates that when discussing the problem of phonemes and their differential features, it is necessary to take into account not only their audibility, visibility and motor perceptibility, but also the process of encoding and recoding itself, which occurs when the signal moves from the periphery nervous system towards the center and is possibly recoded differently during these transitions. All this helps to understand the complex hierarchical process of transforming sensory signals (signs) into signs that carry semantic information. However, these complications cannot cancel the results achieved at the initial stages of signal transformation.* From this point of view, it is of interest to transform the sound process into a visible code so that it can be converted back into an auditory one. This is of great practical interest when teaching deaf children oral speech. In 1947 R. Potter" Day. Kopp and G. Green designed the “Visible speech” device -
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Biography
Nikolai Ivanovich Zhinkin (1893 - 1979) - domestic psychologist, representative of the Moscow psycholinguistic school, who has received worldwide recognition; Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences; teacher at VGIK (1929--1947), Moscow State University (1932); full member of the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (1923), chairman of the psychological section of the Scientific Council on Cybernetics of the Academy of Sciences.
He worked on the problems of the relationship between speech, language and thinking, speech activity and the emergence of a speech reaction in a child. Among his numerous works, the works of primary importance stand out: “Mechanisms of speech” (1958), “On code transitions in internal speech” (1964), “Speech as a conductor of information” (1982) - the manuscript was originally called “Speech as a conductor of information that optimizes the work of the intellect."
Nikolai Ivanovich understood language as “the set of means necessary to process and transmit information,” since “language connected the intellect with perception,” and “the semantic aspect of perception is especially striking when receiving speech.” N.I. Zhinkin emphasizes that “in humans, intellect and language reinforce each other. These are complementary links of one mechanism. Without intelligence there is no language, but without language there is no intelligence.”
Language, as an independent system with its own structure, is a means of realizing the speech process. Language and speech are closely related, speech is the sphere of language functioning, without language there is no speech.
“Language and speech perform the functions of optimizing human activity and all behavior... The body realizes genetic information, and language - historical information. The body cannot forget what has developed in evolution, and the human language is looking for information for its improvement... Man is looking for new and better situations.”
Language is realized through speech, which Nikolai Ivanovich considered as an action performed by one of the partners for the purpose of transmitting thoughts and semantic influence in relation to the other partner - through the mechanism of generating and understanding messages: encoding and decoding information.
Communication needs have developed special mechanisms:
Coding (message recording),
Decoding (understanding messages),
Recoding (processing messages into the language of internal speech and subject relations).
N.I. Zhinkin identifies interacting codes: discrete (letter), continuous (sound) and mixed (in inner speech). These codes have formed into a single system: language - auditory speech - inner speech - intellect - with functions characteristic of each code. “The continuous sound code is a channel of direct communication between communication partners.
N.I. Zhinkin, as a psycholinguist, at the center of his research raised questions related to the generation, perception and understanding of speech. In the well-known work “Speech as a Conductor of Information,” the problems of the relationship between language, speech, and intelligence are solved by reaching the speaker. And this means access to communicative and psychological conditions communication. Revealing the nature of the external and internal components of the phenomenon of language-speech-intelligence. He develops his concept of a universal subject code, reflecting the “device” and the mechanism of its action. This code is dual in nature. On the one hand, it is a sign system of notations (phonemes, morphemes, word forms, sentences, text), on the other hand, it is a system of “material signals in which language is realized.”
Phoneme in speech language
Speech sounds are perceived by humans in a continuous - iconic code. This means that the sensory and sound composition of the speech stream changes all the time, and it is as a result of this that information transmitted to the partner accumulates all the time. No change can be noticed unless there is something that remains constant or changes in a different order of time. Since in speech the sound stream is truly continuous, the phoneme cannot be distinguished quite accurately from this continuity. In other words, it cannot be heard as special, separate. Yet everyday experience suggests that sounds are distinguishable within words. Without this, it would be impossible to understand anything in speech at all. They soon came to the conclusion that every thing, including a phoneme, is recognized by its signs.
Based on elementary observations of a child’s phonation during a certain period of language acquisition, it is possible to establish, without any instruments, that the child hears, namely hears the differential feature of a phoneme. An adult, of course, also hears these signs, but cannot give himself an account of it. An adult hears the entire phoneme, as a component of a syllable and a word, while a child does not understand either words or their combinations, but he pronounces syllables and sometimes reacts to spoken words. Based on all this, we can certainly assert that the child hears the differential feature of the phoneme as an invariant. Typically, an invariant is found based on the processing of variants in perceptual experience. In this case, the child initially has no experience and no options. On the basis of self-learning, he himself creates experience for himself to bring together the different emerging options. The established invariant, adapted to the remaining components of the phoneme, is the result of information processing during the formation of a linguistic sign that has not yet received meaning. This phenomenon should be considered as a universal of human language. Children whose parents speak different languages experience the same phenomena. The result is a language that is translated into other languages.
A phoneme cannot actually be isolated from a syllable, but when it is processed and replaced by a letter, it will merge with other phonemes depending on its place in the syllable and word. All this indicates that when discussing the problem of phonemes and their differential features, it is necessary to take into account not only their audibility, visibility and motor perceptibility, but also the process of encoding and recoding itself, which occurs during the transition of a signal from the periphery of the nervous system to the center and, possibly, is recoded differently during these transitions. All this helps to understand the complex hierarchical process of transforming sensory signals (signs) into signs that carry semantic information.
However, these complications cannot undo the results achieved at the initial stages of signal conversion. From this point of view, it is of interest to transform the sound process into a visible code so that it can be converted back into an auditory one. This is of great practical interest when teaching deaf children oral speech.
A deaf person does not hear the words to be pronounced, but he has a visible code for visually deciphering what is spoken and mastering the actions of utterance - through the dynamics of the lips. The entry into work of a part of the articulatory apparatus, due to its systematic nature, causes the inclusion of other parts of the same apparatus, which can be corrected by the teacher. In this roundabout way, the audible phoneme, transformed into a visible one, is supplemented by visible articulation of the lips and, accordingly, the entire pronunciation of the sound.
In the process of speech processing during encoding and decoding, a strictly regulated neural restructuring occurs during decoding in the direction from a continuous code to a discrete one, and during encoding - from a discrete code to a continuous one. This is evident if only because the word pronounced in sounds, in the final stage of processing at the reception, means the same thing as written in letters. This means that the sound envelope of the word has already played its role, and at the level of intelligence the word will be processed as if it consists of letters. It is clear why in some cases the typist, when asked what sound she hears in the word Moscow, after m, answers: o, although it sounds like a.
A word as a unit of language consists of always defined phonemes and is recognized as a result of the constancy of its phonemic composition. This phenomenon in linguistics is expressed in the fact that the sounds in a word are phonemes and are studied in a special branch of science - phonology.
It is necessary to distinguish between a phoneme and a speech sound. In the first case, we mean that audible sound shell that corresponds to a discrete component of a word and is determined by a bundle of differential features. It is believed that if a person distinguishes words by meaning, then he hears phonemes. In the second case, we mean all sorts of sound phenomena that occur in the process of realizing language in speech, observed by hearing and recorded by special acoustic equipment.
From these definitions it follows that the phoneme itself exists in language, and its implementation in speech is found in three types of code - continuous, discrete and mixed.
Phonemes belong to the area of language and directly as a linguistic phenomenon cannot be fixed instrumentally. The study of the phoneme system of a given language is limited to a special discipline - phonology. But since phonemes one way or another merge into a continuous syllabic code, their sound rearrangement in syllables will, of course, be noticed in perception and will be interpreted as a sign of a change in phoneme in the word form, i.e., as a grammatical fact. If a fusion of sounds occurs in syllables that does not correspond to the acquired phonemes, it is not noticed in perception.
A distinctive (distinctive) feature is a means for integrating (generalizing) a phoneme, and a phoneme is a means for integrating a suffix that already has a semantic orientation. However, the distinctive feature in itself has no meaning. This is speech material formed under certain sound generation conditions. As noted above, a phoneme has many different features, and the feature by which a phoneme can be recognized must be distinguished from many others (signs of voices, states of the speaker, etc.). The mechanism of such isolation must be contained in the language system before communication takes effect in the speech process, since otherwise the phoneme will not be able to enter into the integrative integrity of the word. All this indicates that language and speech are a purely human property that is in the process of formation, development and continues to improve.
Phonemic integration generates words as meaningful means. One word means absolutely nothing, and their accumulation, arranged in a line, will not contain information, since it does not form an integrative system. Such a system is a way of connecting words. The first phase of semantic integration was the creation of word forms, the second phase was the way of connecting words. But before moving on to the consideration of the second phase, it is advisable to find out how the combination of signs inside or outside a word leads to the formation of an objective meaning, albeit vague (diffuse), but still clearly containing some information about reality.
Suffixes not only characterize the form of a word, greatly facilitating its recognition, but also indicate certain subject relations: in the finger, kindergarten. The suffix -ik- fixes our attention on the size of the subject of speech. The same suffix can also be used as an affectionate one, which is helped by intonation and gestures. In terms of the problems discussed here, it is interesting to pay attention to the fact that domesticated animals, in particular birds, can also use diminutive and affectionate suffixes.
Let's give an example: Budgerigar two months after the educational communication, he began to speak independently, i.e. pronounce sounds similar to the syllabic articulomes of the human language with a reasonable degree of intelligibility. They named him Petya. Then they turned to him - Petrusha, Petro, Petechka, Petyusha. The most significant thing in these observations is that soon, during training, he began to make up names for himself - Petelka, Petyulyusenky, Petrovichka, Lyublyu, Lyublyusenky, Petilyusenky, Popozoychik (butt - from a parrot, Zoya - the name of the mistress).
The parrot tries to convert microwords with a diminutive suffix into an adjective, a verb and add them to the first word - spoemchik, let's sing spoemchik, Petechka pierkaet, boy's birdie. There is a need to complement one word with another in a different form. This is the source of the formation of parts of speech. However, the efforts made do not achieve the goal; a division into suffixes that would form a complete integrated word does not work out. Such a word is impossible without another; there are no lonely words in the language. In the parrot, only endearing suffixes and diminutives in the meaning of endearments acquired meaning. The passion with which the parrot communicates with its owner is striking. Emotion is not what is said in speech, but the state in which the speaker is. This is what leads partners to friendly sociability or, in the case of a negative relationship between partners, to hot-tempered antagonism.
But since suffixes as part of a word form enter into sign relations, they begin to acquire semantic significance, i.e., reflect subject relations.
Grammatical space
The main material for condensing words in grammatical space are inflections, inflectional suffixes and postfixes, as well as forms of the auxiliary verb to be. A certain set of these components predetermines the word form of another word, for example:
I'm walking... I'm walking down the street.
Walking... Vasya...
They walk... They...
Walking... Possible
Comes... You...
Walks/will... I
This example shows the way in which one word is linked to another. This is the two-word model. Each word in this second phase of integration is associated with another or several others and forms a whole in which a natural dynamics of word change arises.
Perception and iconic speech memory
A person tries to combine even randomly scattered discrete points in perception. For a long time, people, looking at the starry sky, found images of the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, etc. What is expressed in intonation (question, order, plea, request, etc.) can be transformed into a visual image through facial expressions and pantomime. In general, any sign system during its implementation requires one or another type of sensory. And then iconic coding arises in the form of images.
As you know, a telegraph operator, working in Morse code, will silently (in internal speech) translate dots, dashes and intervals into letters, words and phrases. He immediately reads Morse code as normal alphabetic text. Such a translation is nothing more than a transition from one code to another. In other words, in order to move to a code that is understandable, a person must learn the previous, preparatory codes available to him as an organism, as a neurophysiological unit. You cannot immediately listen to speech and learn to perceive it, much less understand it. Everything that was said above about the phases of integration of speech units, the formation of word forms, and the internal, suffixal connections of these forms was nothing more than the formation of a preliminary information stage in the transition to a code capable of transporting thought and understanding it. This is achieved through a purely human formation - an image. A person who has heard or read a certain combination of words immediately has an image of reality. This is a concept, a reflection of reality. If it were possible to compose exactly the same series only from word forms, they would not evoke an image. But then a lexeme appears on the word form, and then a miracle happens - the words disappear and instead of them there appears an image of the reality that is reflected in the content of these words. Such a device opens the way for limitless improvement in the processing of information flows processed by humans.
From the above, we can conclude that a person understands what is communicated to him as his ability to create a message himself develops at the same level of integration. It must, as it were, simultaneously decode and encode. In order to understand, one must do something (a lot), but in order to do it, one must understand how to do it. The code on which a person encodes and decodes is the same. This is a universal subject code. It (hereinafter referred to as the Code of Criminal Procedure) is universal because it is characteristic of the human brain and has commonality for different human languages. This means that subject (denotational) translations from one human language to another are possible, despite the uniqueness of dynamic integrations in each of them.
Internal speech operates on this code, which has the ability to move from internal control to external control, relying not only on sound and letter signals, but also on the entire sensory palette through visual representations. Behind the words you can always see not only what is being said, but also what is being kept silent and what is expected.
In general form, the universal subject code (UCC) is structured in such a way as to control the speaker’s speech and so that partners understand exactly what is being said, about what subject (thing, phenomenon, event), why and for whom it is needed, and what conclusion can be drawn from what was said. The subject code is the junction of speech and intelligence. Here the translation of thoughts into human language takes place.
Speech is a sequence of syllables that form an iconic (perception, recognition) code. The child not only pronounces syllables, but can also hear two sounds in one continuous syllable. But can he distinguish sounds? This is the main question that needs to be resolved in order to understand how the information hierarchy of speech is built.
By the age of one, a child has mastered 9 words, by one and a half - 39 words, by two years - 300, and by four years - 2000. Such rapid language acquisition can be called a miracle. By the age of four, a child has mastered all grammar and speaks mostly correctly. Let us recall that in this case it is not imitation that is at work, but a persistent need for verbal communication and an awakened interest in the surrounding reality.
The most amazing thing is that already in babbling, the child practices repeating syllables. Repeating the syllables pa-ba, pa-ba, pa-ba means recognizing two phonemes in a syllable, distinguishing the syllable pa from the syllable ba, remembering these syllables and reproducing them in the future. In babbling, a child not only pronounces, but plays with syllables, repeating first one and then another. You might think that he is having fun listening to himself and reproducing the same thing.
And yet, the question of whether the child hears two sounds in a syllable during the period of babbling should be answered in the negative. When a parrot, starling or canary pronounces words in human language by imitation, we can say that they have formed a feedback auditory-motor connection. The same cannot be said about a child. The parrot confirmed the memorized words forever. It will repeat a constant sequence of sounds on one occasion or another. The child changes the sequence of syllables and the composition of sounds in them in different ways. He is amused by the fact that they are different, but he has not yet formed any feedback. He clearly pronounces the syllables for himself, and sometimes to himself. This is not communication.
In babbling, syllabic gymnastics occurs, the child practices pronouncing syllables regardless of their sign composition, [pa] and [p"a] are different not only in the softness of [n], but also in the reduction of [a], therefore the distinctive function in babbling is not carried out However, sound-motor feedback has formed. This should be especially noted, since linguistic feedback is not just a connection between sound and articulatory movement, but the identification of what is heard and what is pronounced.
A person, listening to himself, controls whether he says what he intended, and how his statement turns out and affects his partner. Language feedback is not a standard reflex, as happens when a parrot or starling imitates human speech.
In humans, feedback arises from the very essence of communication and is a source for the formation of a universal subject code. The act of communication leads to mutual understanding and identification of subject meanings. Such a connection must be formed at all levels of the language hierarchy.
Language, speech and text
Zhinkin language speech memory
Speech must not only be perceived, but also understood, which is achieved by processing sentences. A new sentence with its own syntactic structure, entering the field of perception, erases traces of the previous sentence in immediate memory. The processed result enters long-term memory. But then a paradoxical situation arises - from long-term memory it is impossible to reproduce in the same form those few sentences that were just sent to it for storage. You can learn these sentences through a series of repetitions, and then your memory will be able to reproduce them. However, such an operation makes little sense. If our partner reproduces the accepted sequence of sentences literally, we will not know whether he understood what was said. Mechanical speech reproduction is not meaningful. This is why wells inevitably arise between sentences. Reproduction of randomly typed sentences is possible only after repeated repetitions. This phenomenon has long been established in psychology.
But if it is impossible to literally reproduce a group of just perceived sentences, then it is quite possible to reconstruct them according to their meaning. This, in fact, is the essence of communication in the process of speech. Meaning is a feature of specific vocabulary. With the help of naming, a certain object is highlighted (by object we mean everything about which something can be said) in its relation to another object. This relationship is called lexical meaning. It is assumed that when language is acquired, lexical meanings are also acquired. However, it is impossible to find out to what extent they have been learned by reproducing them separately; it is necessary to apply an ensemble of meanings in order to discover the meaning that is applicable in a given case. But since new information is transmitted in the process of communication, the meaning of each lexeme included in the ensemble changes to some extent. Lexical polysemy through the selection of words opens up wide opportunities for inclusion in the ensemble of semantic shifts that bring their meanings closer to the speaker’s intention with a certain threshold.
The vocabulary in the memory of each person is not the same. There is some general part, and unfamiliar vocabulary can be translated into this general part. And if we talk about internal speech, into which the received text is always translated, then lexical differences begin to play an even greater role. That is why the identification of denotation, necessary for understanding a text, occurs through translation into internal speech, where subjective signals and marks are transformed into a vocabulary common to people - common, but not the same. This is helped by the polysemy of the language, metaphor and linguistic community of speakers, as well as, of course, the semantic appropriateness of the use of these lexical substitutions in a given type and segment of text.
There is no doubt that a statement will be meaningful only when it contains some kind of thought. Thought is the result of the work of the intellect. A remarkable feature of language is that its structure makes it possible to transmit thoughts from one person to another. What we said about the universal subject code should be repeated, since it was only an assumption. It was necessary in order to show the process of development and connection between the levels of language. Already in the first steps of the self-development of a language, signals of a completely diffuse nature appear - strange signs without any meaning - these are phonemes and their signs - word forms. Further, these signs accumulate, combine, and form the dynamics of rule-based differentiations, which are controlled by feedback. And only now, when the hierarchy of levels culminated in a proposal, significant changes took place. It becomes obvious that a word can not only have a special meaning in a given sentence, but, when encountered with another word in another sentence, change this meaning. At the same time, although the speaker is given greater freedom of arbitrary selection of words and automatic presentation of grammatical the right combinations, he must put in all possible work in order to select words for the sentence he is preparing. Imagine that your partner says: Pick a watermelon at the base of the dog and put it on the ant ring. This sentence is grammatically correct, composed of specific words of the Russian language and has two predicates - pick and put. This correct sentence will not be authorized by the universal subject code for processing, although general scheme subject relations is indicated: you need to pick a watermelon and put it in a certain place. But in reality there are no specified places, and the proposed operation cannot be performed.
Meaning arises not only in lexemes. It begins to form before language and speech. You need to see things, move among them, listen, touch - in a word, accumulate in memory all the sensory information that enters the analyzers. Only under these conditions is speech received by the ear processed from the very beginning as a sign system and integrated in an act of semiosis. Already the “language of nannies” is materially understandable to the child and is accepted by the Code of Criminal Procedure.
The formation of meaning in speech, one must think, occurs in a special mechanism of communication. Communication will not take place if the thought transmitted from one partner to another is not identified. The speaker has a speech intention. He knows what he will talk about; logical stress emphasizes the predicate, i.e., what will be discussed. Thus, there is not only a certain statement, but a perspective for the development of thought. This means that the subject area of the statement is indicated.
There must always be a bridge between partners’ remarks—inner speech, in which lexical meanings are integrated and textual meaning is formed. Let one of the partners say a few sentences. At the reception, when perceived by the other partner, these sentences are semantically compressed into a subjective, objective-visual and schematic code. Each of these sentences is completed and, as mentioned above, grammatical wells have formed between them. How does meaning arise? Let's look at this with an example:
1. Black, lively eyes looked intently from the canvas.
2. It seemed as if the lips were about to part and a cheerful joke, already playing on an open and friendly face, would fall from them.
4. A plaque attached to the gilded frame indicated that the portrait of Cinginnato Baruzzi was painted by K. Bryullov.
In this text there are such deep holes between the first three sentences that it is not so easy to connect them in meaning. And only the fourth sentence contains everything necessary to link all four sentences together. But the fourth sentence, taken separately, is also unclear.
In internal speech, this text is compressed into a concept (representation) containing a semantic cluster of the entire text segment. The concept is stored in long-term memory and can be restored in words that do not literally coincide with those perceived, but those that integrate the same meaning that was contained in the lexical integral of the received utterance.
Now we can more accurately define what textual meaning is. Text meaning is the integration of the lexical meanings of two adjacent sentences of a text. If integration does not occur, the next adjacent sentence is taken, and so on until the moment when a semantic connection between these sentences arises.
The conclusion that to understand a text requires the integration of two or more adjacent sentences is of great importance for elucidating the entire hierarchical structure of language - speech. The proposal is the highest level of the hierarchy. Units of all lower levels are verified in one way or another in the sentence, since it is the sentence that contains the meaning. It is absurd to imagine speech devoid of sentences.
The text becomes the memory of human society, providing it with information and optimizing intelligence. Of course, this text from memory again enters the cycle of individual codes. As a result, a person’s statements acquire objectively real force and become a means of changing situations, remaking things, forming new things and events. This means that language—speech—performs creative functions.
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The main components of human activity: sensation, perception, attention, imagination, memory, thinking, speech. Methods for studying cognitive processes of personality: selectivity and stability of attention, short-term memory and learning words.
test, added 01/30/2011
The concept of speech in psychological science as a form of communication mediated by language. Unconsciousness, leveling and meaningfulness of speech perception. Basic models of speech perception in the context of psycholinguistics. Psycholinguistic theory of speech understanding.
test, added 02/22/2013
Psychological structure of the process of perception and understanding of speech. Methods for studying speech understanding (questions and structures). Peculiarities of understanding the speech of a child with speech disorders. Psychological structure and comparative analysis of theories of speech production.
test, added 10/31/2014
The concept of speech. Speech and thinking. Communicative function of speech. Informational (transfer of knowledge), emotional-expressive (influences a person’s feelings), regulatory orientation of communication (implemented in the expression of will). Speech perception.
abstract, added 11/29/2008
Theoretical basis studying the speech of preschool children (from 3 to 7 years). Speech and its functions: a means of communication and thinking, controlling the behavior of other people and regulating a person’s own behavior; carrier of consciousness, memory and information.
course work, added 01/05/2014
Characteristics of speech. Higher nervous activity of man. Brain organization of speech. Speech impairment. Models of speech production. Speech in children. Psychology of speech. Physiology of speech. Reflexive nature of speech activity.
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Summary
Speech and its functions. The meaning of speech in a person’s life, in his psychology and behavior. Speech as a means of communication (communication) and generalization (thinking). Types of speech, their purpose. The difference between speech and language. Meaning and meaning. The word as a concept. Contraction and expanded speech, their psychological characteristics. Theories of language acquisition and speech development. Learning theory in speech development. Nativist and cognitive theories. Mastering speech as the development of meanings and meanings. Psycholinguistic model of speech production and functioning.
Speech as a means of communication. Information exchange is the primary function of speech. Communication in humans and monkeys. Expressive-expressive and contextual functions of animal speech. The difference between human speech and the means of communication among monkeys. The meaning of units of human speech, its conceptual structure. The problem of congenital and acquired™ human speech ability. Experience of teaching animals human speech.
Connection of thought with word. Participation of the human vocal apparatus in solving intellectual problems. Experimental evidence of the existence of inner speech and its participation in thinking processes.
Correlation of thinking and speech. The meaning of the word as a unit of thinking and speech. Features of the initial period of development of thinking and speech in a child,
The idea of inner speech, its structure and meaning. Egocentric speech of a child as an intermediate form between internal and external speech. Discussion by L.S. Vygotsky and J. Piaget about the essence and fate of egocentric speech. The formation and functioning of children's speech, the development of its grammatical structures and communicative functions. Mechanisms of speech acquisition by a child.
SPEECH AND ITS FUNCTIONS
Speech is the main means of human communication. Without it, a person would not have the opportunity to receive and transmit a large amount of information, in particular that which carries a large semantic load or captures something that cannot be perceived with the help of the senses (abstract concepts, not directly perceived phenomena, laws, rules, etc.) .P.). Without written language, a person would be deprived of the opportunity to find out how people of previous generations lived, thought and did. He would not have the opportunity to communicate his thoughts and feelings to others. Thanks to speech as a means of communication, a person’s individual consciousness, not limited to personal experience, is enriched by the experience of other people, and to a much greater extent than observation and other processes of non-speech, direct cognition carried out through the senses: perception, attention, imagination, memory can allow. and thinking. Through speech, the psychology and experience of one person become accessible to other people, enrich them, and contribute to their development.
In terms of its vital significance, speech is multifunctional. It is not only a means of communication, but also a means of thinking, a carrier of consciousness, memory, information (written texts), a means of controlling the behavior of other people and regulating a person’s own behavior. According to its many functions, speech is polymorphic activity, those. in its various functional purposes it is presented in different forms: external, internal, monologue, dialogue, written, oral, etc. Although all these forms of speech are interconnected, their purpose in life is not the same. External speech, for example, plays mainly the role of a means of communication, internal speech - a means of thinking. Written speech most often acts as a way to remember information. Monologue serves the process of one-way, and dialogue serves the process of two-way exchange of information.
It is important to distinguish language from speech. Their main difference is as follows. Language- this is a system of conventional symbols with the help of which combinations of sounds are transmitted that have a certain meaning and meaning for people. Speech is a set of pronounced or perceived sounds that have the same meaning and the same meaning as the corresponding system of written signs. Language is the same for all people who use it; speech is individually unique. Speech expresses the psychology of an individual person or a community of people for whom these speech features are characteristic; language reflects the psychology of the people for whom it is native, not only living people, but also all others who lived before and spoke a given language. language.
Speech without language acquisition is impossible, while language can exist and develop relatively independently of a person, according to laws not related to either his psychology or his behavior.
The connecting link between language and speech is meaning of the word. It is expressed both in units of language and in units of speech.
At the same time, speech carries a certain meaning that characterizes the personality of the person who uses it. Meaning, unlike meaning, is expressed in those purely personal thoughts, feelings, images, associations that a given word evokes in this particular person. The meanings of the same words for different people are different, although the linguistic meanings may be the same.
The most important role of the word is that in its meaning it generally reflects reality that exists outside and independently of individual human consciousness. Meaning reflects not only the objective, but also the subjective world this person and highly individual. Speech, saturated with subjective semantic content, reflects the entire psychology of a person, and this circumstance is the basis for the use of speech in the system of personal psychodiagnostics.
The meaning of words is directly related to the idea of them as concepts. What is a concept? Why is so much importance given to children’s learning and upbringing?
In the world around us there are infinitely many different objects and phenomena, and if we tried to call each of them a separate word, then the vocabulary that we
would have to be used, it would become practically vast, and the language itself would be inaccessible to man. We simply could not use it as a means of communication.
Fortunately, the situation is such that we do not at all need to come up with our own specific name, an independent word, for each separately existing object or phenomenon. In our communication and in our thinking, we get by quite satisfactorily with a very limited number of them, and our vocabulary is much smaller than the number of objects and phenomena denoted by words. Each such word is a concept that relates not to one object or phenomenon, but to their whole class, distinguished by a set of general and specific characteristics. These same signs for the distinguished class of phenomena and objects act as essential, i.e. expressing their main qualities and properties, and not secondary characteristics. Everything that has been said is included in the idea of the scope and content of the concept. To know it means to be able to correctly indicate the scope and content of the corresponding concept.
Words-concepts allow us to generalize and deepen our knowledge about objects, going beyond the limits of direct experience in their knowledge, beyond what is given to us through the senses. The concept captures the essential and ignores the inessential in objects and phenomena; it can develop by enriching its volume and content. New knowledge can therefore enter into the old system of concepts and be expressed using already known words. In this regard, there is rarely a need to invent completely new words in order to express newly acquired knowledge. Thanks to the conceptual structure of language, we have the opportunity, using a limited number of words, to designate an almost unlimited number of phenomena and objects. In particular, ambiguous words and expressions serve this purpose. These are the majority of words that form the basis of modern developed languages. Using a very conditional analogy from the field of mathematics, one could say that the number of words in a language grows in an arithmetic progression, and the amount of knowledge expressed with their help grows in a geometric progression.
Possessing a concept, we know a lot about an object or phenomenon. If we were shown some unfamiliar object and called it a concept known to us, then we automatically attribute this subject all those, even if not yet really
the qualities seen in it, which are contained in the content and scope of the corresponding concept.
The concept also acts as an important element of perception, attention, memory, and not just thinking and speech. It gives selectivity and depth to all these processes. Using a concept to designate an object or phenomenon, we seem to automatically see in them (understand, imagine, perceive and remember about them) more than is given to us directly through the senses. By turning to concepts, we significantly save communication and thinking time, reducing the number of necessary words to a minimum and maximizing operations.
Of the many qualities and attributes of an object or phenomenon contained in a word-concept, the child initially learns only those that directly appear in the actions he performs with the corresponding objects. Subsequently, as he gains and enriches his life experience, he acquires a deeper meaning of the corresponding concept, including those qualities of the objects it denotes that are not directly perceived.
The process of concept formation begins in the child long before mastering speech, but becomes truly active only when the child has sufficiently mastered speech as a means of communication and developed his practical intelligence.
Human speech can be shortened and expanded from both conceptual and linguistic points of view. In the expanded type of speech, the speaker uses all the possibilities of symbolic expression of meanings, meanings and their shades provided by the language. This type of speech is characterized by a large vocabulary and a wealth of grammatical forms, the frequent use of prepositions to express logical, temporal and spatial relations, the use of impersonal and indefinite personal pronouns, the use of suitable concepts, clarifying adjectives and adverbs to denote one or another specific state of affairs, more pronounced syntactic and grammatical structuring of utterances, numerous subordinating connections of sentence components, indicating anticipatory planning of speech.
A shortened speech utterance is sufficient for understanding among well-known people and in familiar surroundings. However, it makes it difficult to express and perceive more complex, abstract thoughts associated with subtle distinctions and differential analysis of hidden relationships. In service
During theoretical thinking, a person more often uses detailed speech.
Let's consider the main psychological theories that explain the process of speech formation. One of them - learning theory. This theory states that imitation and reinforcement are the main mechanisms for the formation and development of speech in humans. It is assumed that the child has an innate need and ability to imitate, including the sounds of human speech. Receiving positive emotional reinforcement, imitation leads to the rapid assimilation, first, of the sounds of human speech, then of phonemes, morphemes, words, statements, and the rules of their grammatical construction. Mastering speech, therefore, comes down to learning all its basic elements.
This theory, however, is not able to satisfactorily and completely explain the process of language acquisition, in particular the speed with which a child masters speech in early childhood. In addition, for the development of any abilities, including speech, inclinations are necessary, which in themselves cannot be acquired as a result of learning (at least before learning begins). From the perspective of this theory, it is difficult to understand children’s word creation, as well as those moments in the development of a child’s speech that have no analogues in adults, i.e. those that cannot be learned by imitation.
Experience shows that adults reinforce in a child not so much grammatically correct statements as smart and truthful, original and semantically accurate statements. With this in mind, within the framework of the theory of speech learning it is difficult to explain the rapid formation of the correct grammar of speech utterances in children.
The author of the following theory of speech development is N. Chomsky. He argues that in the human body and brain from birth there are some specific inclinations for speech acquisition in its main attributes. These inclinations mature around the age of one and open up opportunities for accelerated speech development from one to three years. This age is called sensitive for speech formation. Within broader age boundaries, it covers the period of a person’s life from one year to puberty (this refers not only to the acquisition of language as a means of communication, but also to its mastery at the conceptual level as a means of thinking). During this entire period of time, speech development usually occurs without complications, but outside of this period, language is either difficult to acquire, or not at all.
Figure 55. Psychological model of speech production and functioning
impossible. For this reason, adult immigrants learn a foreign language worse than their young children.
Another popular theory of language acquisition is called cognitive. According to it, the development of speech depends on the child’s inherent ability from birth to perceive and intellectually process information. This, in particular, explains children's spontaneous word creation. It is assumed that speech development depends on the development of thinking, and not vice versa (J. Piaget). It has been established - and this is one of the main starting points of this theory - that the first statements of children usually relate to what they already understand. Children, in addition, usually talk about what is interesting to them. Consequently, the child’s motivation also influences the development of speech.
The development of speech can also be considered from a psycholinguistic point of view (Fig. 55) in terms of the formation of an increasingly perfect structure of speech. From this point of view, the process of speech development represents continuously and cyclically repeating transitions from thought to word and from word to thought, which become more and more conscious and rich in content. First, a thought is formed into a word, which simultaneously acts as both a phrase and a sentence, without further linguistically subtle division. The same poverty of forms and variations is characteristic of the reverse process of movement from word to thought. Then this process unfolds vertically (as shown in Fig. 55) and horizontally. The last movement is characterized by the expansion of possibilities for representing thoughts in words at different levels. For example, at the sentence and phrase levels, the same idea can be expressed differently by people with rich speech.
A child’s acquisition of speech begins with the selection of speech signals from the entire set of sound stimuli. Then, in his perception, these signals are combined into morphemes, words, sentences, and phrases. On their basis, coherent, meaningful external speech is formed, serving communication and thinking. The process of translating thoughts into words goes in the opposite direction.
SPEECH AS A MEANS OF COMMUNICATION
In phylogenesis, speech probably initially acted as a means of communication between people, a way of exchanging information between them. This assumption is supported by the fact that
Many animals have developed means of communication, and only humans have the ability to use speech when solving intellectual problems. In chimpanzees, for example, we find relatively high developed speech, which is in some respects humanoid. Chimpanzee speech, however, expresses only the organic needs of animals and their subjective states. It is a system of emotionally expressive expressions, but never a symbol or sign of anything outside the animal. The language of animals does not have the same meanings that human speech is rich in, much less meanings. In the various forms of gesture-mimic and pantomimic communication of chimpanzees, emotional and expressive movements, although very bright, rich in form and shades, come first.
In animals, in addition, one can find expressive movements associated with so-called social emotions, for example, special gestures - greeting each other. Higher animals, as experience of careful observation of their communication shows, are well versed in each other's gestures and facial expressions. With the help of gestures, they express not only their emotional states, but also impulses aimed at other objects. The most common way chimpanzees communicate in such cases is that they begin the movement or action that they want to reproduce or to which they want to induce another animal. Grasping movements serve the same purpose, expressing the monkey’s desire to receive an object from another animal. Many animals are characterized by a connection between expressive emotional movements and specific vocal reactions. It also, apparently, underlies the emergence and development of human speech.
Let us pay attention to another genetic prerequisite for the development of human speech as a means of communication. For many animals, speech is not only a system of emotional and expressive reactions, but also a means of psychological contact with their own kind. Speech, which is formed in ontogenesis, initially plays the same role in humans, at least up to the age of one and a half years. This speech function is also not yet associated with intelligence.
But the human individual cannot be satisfied with such a communicative role of speech, which is very limited in its capabilities. To convey any experience
or the content of consciousness to another person, there is no other way than to signify speech utterances, i.e. assigning the transmitted content to any known class of objects or phenomena. This certainly requires abstraction and generalization, the expression of generalized abstracted content in a word-concept. Communication between psychologically and culturally developed people certainly involves generalization and the development of verbal meanings. This is the main way to improve human speech, bringing it closer to thinking and including speech in the control of all other cognitive processes.
In recent years, there has been a lot of controversy and discussion about whether the ability to acquire speech is innate in humans or not. The opinions of scientists on this issue are divided: some take the position that this ability is not innate, others adhere to the point of view that it is genetically determined.
On the one hand, there is convincing evidence that it is impossible to talk about any innateness of human speech. These are, for example, the facts of the absence of any signs of articulate human speech in children who grew up in isolation from people speaking their native language and never heard a human voice. This is also data from numerous unsuccessful experiments in teaching higher animals the language of man and the ability to use at least elementary concepts. Only a person, and only under conditions of properly organized training and education, can verbal conceptual speech appear and develop.
On the other hand, there are no less reliable facts that indicate that many higher animals have a developed communication system, which in many of its functions resembles human speech. Higher animals (monkeys, dogs, dolphins and some others) understand human speech addressed to them and selectively react to its emotionally expressive aspects.
There is some experimental evidence that children from birth are able to distinguish human speech and isolate it from many other sounds, respond selectively to it and learn very quickly. If we keep in mind that the main difference between congenital and acquired forms of behavior is that hereditarily determined (having appropriate inclinations) types of behavior develop faster in the presence of appropriate external conditions, then it is quite possible to assume that some genotypic factors contribute to rapid problems in a child’s acquisition of such a complex form of behavior as speech still exist.
Completely acquired behavior, which does not have innate inclinations for development, is formed and progresses slowly, not at all in the same way as is the case in the case of speech acquisition. First, during its development, the simplest elements of acquired behavior appear, which become a kind of inclinations, and only then, on their basis, more complex forms of behavior are constructed. This process, as a rule, is long and covers a very significant period of time in the life of an individual. An example of this is the process of children’s acquisition of concepts, which is completed only by adolescence, although speech is already formed at the age of about three years.
Another proof of the possible existence of innate prerequisites for the acquisition of speech in humans is the typical sequence of stages of its development. This sequence is the same for all children, regardless of where, in what country and when they were born, in what culture they developed and what language they speak. Additional, indirect evidence of the same idea is the following fact: speech by a child, as is known, cannot be acquired before a certain period of time, for example, until one year of life. This becomes possible only when the corresponding anatomical and physiological structures mature in the body.
The main difficulty that must be resolved in order to find a final answer to the question of the presence or absence of innate (genotypic) factors in a person that determine the acquisition of language is that the facts that are usually used to prove or refute the provisions associated with the issue under discussion is subject to different interpretations. And these facts themselves are sometimes quite contradictory. Let's give examples.
1. In the USA, in California, a child was discovered at the age of about 14 years old, with whom no one had any human contact, i.e. through speech, from about 2 months of age. Naturally, he did not speak and did not show any knowledge of the language. Despite the considerable efforts expended, it was never possible to truly teach him to use speech.
2. One of the studies conducted by psychologists studied the process of speech development in six children who were deaf from birth. Their parents had completely normal hearing and for a long time did not allow their children to use the language of facial expressions and gestures in communication. However, even before these children had the opportunity to perceive and understand people’s speech by lip movements, to independently pronounce speech sounds, i.e. before they had acquired any knowledge of their native language, they had already begun to use signs. These children, having eventually mastered speech quite well, went through the same stages in its development as healthy children. First, they learned to correctly use gestures denoting individual words, then moved on to two- or three-word sentence gestures, and finally to entire multi-phrase statements.
The following question is very interesting, but no less complex: are higher animals able to master human speech? Numerous early experiments in teaching speech to monkeys did not, as we know, give a satisfactory answer to this question. The anthropoids in these experiments were taught verbal language and the use of concepts, but all these attempts ended in failure.
Subsequently, scientists working on this problem abandoned teaching animals the highest form of human speech associated with thinking, and decided to try to teach animals to use the human language of facial expressions and gestures, the one used by congenitally deaf people. And the experience was a success.
One of the most famous and fruitful studies of this type was carried out in 1972. Its authors, American scientists B.T. Gardner and R.A. Hardner, attempted to teach female chimpanzees to use some special signs borrowed from the American version of the language of the deaf. Learning began when the chimpanzee was about one year old (about the same time a human child begins to actively acquire language) and continued for four years. All those who cared for animals had to use only the language of facial expressions and gestures when communicating with them.
At first, people actively supported any attempts by the monkey to independently reproduce and practically use one or another gesture demonstrated to it in communication with a person. Later, after the experimenter, having taken the monkey’s hands in his own, at the right moment depicted the studied gesture for a sufficiently long period of time, the monkey learned to use this kind of signs well. In the end
the animal independently began to learn new gestures, simply by watching how a person uses them.
By the age of about 4 years, Washi (that was the name of the monkey) could already independently reproduce about 130 different gestures, and understood even more. A similar positive result was later obtained by other researchers. For example, F.G. Patterson, teaching sign language to a gorilla monkey named Coco from 1 to 7 years old, taught her to use 375 signs in communicating with people.
These studies, of course, do not definitively prove that animals - in this case, the great apes - are able to assimilate human speech, understand and use it at the conceptual level. Higher, conceptual forms of speech are still inaccessible to them, and those signs that they learn to use do not go beyond the implementation of the communicative function. Moreover, there are still no convincing facts indicating that animals are able to form sentences from signs or change the order of words to express the same thought. In other words, in the animal world no progress towards the merging of thought and word has yet been established.
SPEECH AS A TOOL OF THINKING
The main function of speech in humans is still that it is an instrument of thinking. A word as a concept contains much more information than a simple combination of sounds can carry.
The fact that human thinking is inextricably linked with speech is primarily proven by psychophysiological studies of the participation of the vocal apparatus in solving mental problems. Electromyographic 1 study of the functioning of the vocal apparatus in connection with mental activity showed that in the most difficult and intense moments of thinking, a person experiences increased activity of the vocal cords. This activity appears in two forms: phasic and tonic. The first is recorded in the form of high-amplitude and irregular bursts of speech motor potentials, and the second - in the form of a gradual increase in the amplitude of the electromyogram. It has been experimentally proven that the phasic form of speech motor potentials is associated with the hidden pronunciation of words to oneself, while the tonic form is associated with a general increase in speech motor activity.
It turned out that all types of human thinking associated with the need to use more or less detailed reasoning are accompanied by an increase in speech motor impulses, and habitual and repeated mental actions are accompanied by its reduction. There appears to be a certain optimal level of variation in the intensity of human speech-motor reactions, at which mental operations are performed most successfully, as quickly and accurately as possible.
RELATIONSHIP OF THINKING AND SPEECH
Throughout the history of psychological research into thinking and speech, the problem of the connection between them has attracted increased attention. Its proposed solutions were very different - from the complete separation of speech and thinking and considering them as completely independent functions from each other to their equally unambiguous and unconditional combination, up to absolute identification.
Many modern scientists adhere to a compromise point of view, believing that although thinking and speech are inextricably linked, they represent relatively independent realities both in genesis and functioning. The main question that is now being discussed in connection with this problem is the question of the nature of the real connection between thinking and speech, their genetic roots and the transformations that they undergo in the process of their separate and joint development.
L.S. Vygotsky made a significant contribution to solving this problem. The word, he wrote, relates to speech as well as to thinking. It is a living cell that contains, in its simplest form, the basic properties inherent in verbal thinking as a whole. A word is not a label pasted as an individual name on a separate object. It always characterizes the object or phenomenon it denotes in a general way and, therefore, acts as an act of thinking.
But the word is also a means of communication, so it is part of speech. Being devoid of meaning, the word is no longer
refers neither to thought nor to speech; Having acquired its meaning, it immediately becomes an organic part of both. It is in the meaning of the word, says L.S. Vygotsky, that the knot of that unity, which is called verbal thinking, is tied.
However, thinking and speech have different genetic roots. Initially they performed different functions and developed separately. The original function of speech was the communicative function. Speech itself as a means of communication arose due to the need to separate and coordinate the actions of people in the process of joint work. At the same time, in verbal communication, the content conveyed by speech belongs to a certain class of phenomena and, therefore, already presupposes their generalized reflection, i.e. fact of thinking. At the same time, such a method of communication as a pointing gesture, for example, does not carry any generalization and therefore does not relate to thought.
In turn, there are types of thinking that are not associated with speech, for example, visual-effective, or practical, thinking in animals. In small children and in higher animals, unique means of communication are found that are not associated with thinking. These are expressive movements, gestures, facial expressions that reflect the internal states of a living being, but are not a sign or a generalization. In the phylogenesis of thinking and speech, a pre-speech phase in the development of intelligence and a pre-intellectual phase in the development of speech clearly emerges.
L.S. Vygotsky believed that at the age of approximately 2 years, i.e. In what J. Piaget designated as the beginning of the stage of pre-operational thinking following sensorimotor intelligence, a critical turning point occurs in the relationship between thinking and speech: speech begins to become intellectualized, and thinking becomes verbal.
Signs of the onset of this turning point in the development of both functions are the child’s rapid and active expansion of his vocabulary (he often begins to ask adults the question: what is this called?) and an equally rapid, spasmodic increase in his communicative vocabulary. The child, as it were, discovers for the first time the symbolic function of speech and discovers an understanding that behind the word as a means of communication there actually lies a generalization, and uses it both for communication and for solving problems. He begins to call different objects with the same word, and this is direct evidence that the child is mastering concepts. When solving any intellectual problems, he begins to reason out loud, and this, in his own way,
turn, a sign that he uses speech as a means of thinking, and not just communication. The meaning of the word as such becomes practically accessible to the child.
But these facts are signs of only the beginning of the real assimilation of concepts and their use in the process of thinking and in speech. Further, this process, deepening, continues for quite a long time, right up to adolescence. Real assimilation scientific concepts as a child occurs relatively late, approximately at the time to which J. Piaget attributed the stage of formal operations, i.e. to average age from 11-12 to 14-15 years. Consequently, the entire period of development of conceptual thinking takes about 10 years in a person’s life. All these years of intensive mental work and educational activities are spent on the child mastering the most important category for the development of both intelligence and all other mental functions and personality as a whole - concepts.
The child's first word has the same meaning as a whole phrase. What an adult would express in an extended sentence, a child conveys in one word. In the development of the semantic (meaningful) side of speech, the child begins with a whole sentence and only then moves on to the use of frequent semantic units, such as individual words. At the initial and final moments, the development of the semantic and physical (sounding) aspects of speech proceeds in different, as if opposite, ways. The semantic side of speech develops from the whole to the part, while its physical side develops from part to whole, from word to sentence.
Grammar is somewhat ahead of logic in the development of a child’s speech. He masters the conjunctions “because”, “despite”, “since”, “although” in speech earlier than the semantic statements corresponding to them. This means, wrote L.S. Vygotsky, that the movement of semantics and the sound of a word in mastering complex syntactic structures do not coincide in development.
This discrepancy appears even more clearly in the functioning of developed thought: the grammatical and logical content of a sentence are not always identical. Even on top level development of thinking and speech, when a child masters concepts, only a partial fusion occurs.
Inner speech is very important for understanding the relationship of thought to word. She is unlike external speech has a special syntax, characterized by fragmentation, fragmentation, abbreviation. The transformation of external speech into internal speech occurs according to a certain law: in it, first of all, the subject is reduced and the predicate remains with the parts of the sentence related to it.
The main syntactic characteristic of inner speech is predicativity. Its examples are found in the dialogues of people who know each other well, who understand “without words” what is being discussed in their “conversation.” Such people, for example, do not sometimes have any need to exchange words at all, to name the subject of the conversation, to indicate the subject in every sentence or phrase they utter: in most cases it is already well known to them. A person, thinking in an internal dialogue, which is probably carried out through inner speech, seems to communicate with himself. Naturally, he doesn’t even need to identify the subject of the conversation for himself.
The basic law of development of the meanings of words used by a child in communication is their enrichment with vital individual meaning. Functioning and developing in practical thinking and speech, the word seems to absorb new meanings. As a result of this operation, the meaning of the word used is enriched with a variety of cognitive, emotional and other associations. In inner speech - and this is its main distinguishing feature - the predominance of meaning over meaning is brought to its highest point. We can say that internal speech, unlike external speech, has a compressed predicative form and an expanded, deep semantic content.
Another feature of the semantics of inner speech is agglutination, i.e. a kind of merging of words into one with their significant abbreviation. The resulting word seems to be enriched with a double or even triple meaning, taken separately from each of the two or three words combined in it. So, in the limit, you can reach a word that absorbs the meaning of a whole statement, and it becomes, as L.S. Vygotsky said, “a concentrated clot of meaning.” To completely translate this meaning into the plane of external speech, it would probably be necessary to use more than one sentence. Inner speech, apparently, consists of words of this kind, completely different in structure and use from the words that we use in our written and spoken speech. Due to the above-mentioned features, such speech can be considered as an internal plane of speech thinking. Inner speech is the process of thinking with “pure meanings”.
A.N. Sokolov showed that in the process of thinking, inner speech is an active articulatory, unconscious process, the unimpeded flow of which is very important for the implementation of those psychological functions in which inner speech takes part 1 . As a result of his experiments with adults, where, in the process of perceiving a text or solving an arithmetic problem, they were asked to simultaneously read out loud well-learned poems or pronounce the same simple syllables (for example, “ba-ba” or “la-la”), it was established that both the perception of texts and the solution of mental problems are seriously hampered in the absence of inner speech. When perceiving texts in this case, only individual words were remembered, and their meaning was not captured. This means that thinking is present during reading and necessarily presupposes the internal, hidden from consciousness, work of the articulatory apparatus, which translates perceived meanings into meanings, of which, in fact, inner speech consists.
Even more revealing than with adult subjects were similar experiments conducted with younger schoolchildren. For them, even a simple mechanical delay in articulation during mental work (clamping the tongue between the teeth) caused serious difficulties in reading and understanding the text and led to gross errors in writing.
A written text is the most extensive speech utterance, which involves a very long and complex path of mental work to translate meaning into meaning. In practice, this translation, as shown by A.N. Sokolov, is also carried out using an active process hidden from conscious control associated with the work of the articulatory apparatus.
Egocentric speech occupies an intermediate position between external and internal speech. This is speech directed not at a communication partner, but at oneself, not calculated and not implying any feedback from another person present at the moment and located next to the speaker. This speech is especially noticeable in children of middle preschool age when they play and seem to talk to themselves during the game.
Elements of this speech can also be found in an adult who, while solving a complex intellectual problem, thinking out loud,
in the process of work he utters some phrases that are understandable only to himself, apparently addressed to another, but not requiring a mandatory response on his part. Egocentric speech is speech-reflection, serving not so much communication as thinking itself. It acts as external in form and internal in its psychological function. Having its original roots in external dialogical speech, it ultimately develops into internal speech. When difficulties arise in a person’s activities, the activity of his egocentric speech increases.
With the transition of external speech to internal egocentric speech gradually disappears. The decrease in its external manifestations should be viewed, as L.S. Vygotsky believed, as an increasing abstraction of thought from the sound side of speech, which is characteristic of internal speech. He was objected to by J. Piaget, who believed that egocentric speech is a rudimentary, relict form of speech that develops from internal to external. In such speech itself, he saw a manifestation of the child’s unsocialized, autistic thoughts. The gradual disappearance of egocentric speech was for him a sign that the child’s thought had acquired those qualities that the logical thinking of an adult possesses. Many years later, having become acquainted with the counterarguments of L.S. Vygotsky, J. Piaget recognized the correctness of his position.
So far we have talked about the development of verbal thinking, i.e. that form of intellectualized speech that sooner or later ultimately turns into thought. We are convinced that thinking in its development has its own sources, independent of speech, and follows its own laws for a long period of time until thought flows into speech, and the latter becomes intellectualized, i.e. understandable. We also know ", that even at the highest levels of development, speech and thinking do not completely coincide. This means that speech must also have its own roots and laws of ontogenetic development. Let's consider some of them.
The experience of studying the process of speech development in children belonging to different peoples, countries, cultures and nations shows that, despite the fact that the differences in the structure and content of modern languages are striking, in general the process of a child’s acquisition of his native speech follows general laws everywhere. For example, children of all countries and peoples with
They acquire language with amazing ease in childhood and master speech, and this process begins and ends at about the same time, going through the same stages. By the age of about 1 year, all children begin to pronounce individual words. At about 2 years of age, a child already speaks in two or three word sentences. By about 4 years of age, all children are able to speak quite freely.
One-year-old children usually already have quite a rich experience of interacting with the surrounding reality. They have clear ideas about their parents, about the environment, about food, about the toys with which they play. Long before children practically begin to use speech, their figurative world already has ideas that correspond to the words they are learning. In such conditions, prepared by previous experience of socialization, for mastering speech there is not much left for the child to do: mentally connect his existing ideas and images of reality with combinations of sounds corresponding to individual words. By the age of one, these sound combinations themselves are also already well known to the child: after all, he has heard them many times from an adult.
The next stage of speech development occurs at the age of approximately 1.5-2.5 years. At this stage, children learn to combine words, combine them into small phrases (two or three words), and they progress quite quickly from using such phrases to composing entire sentences.
After two or three word phrases, the child moves on to using other parts of speech and constructing sentences in accordance with the rules of grammar. At the previous and current stages of speech development, there are three ways to master language and further improve speech on this basis: imitation of adults and other people around them; the formation of conditioned reflex connections, associative in nature, between images of objects, actions, perceived phenomena and corresponding words or phrases; formulation and testing of hypotheses about the connection between words and images empirically (the so-called operant conditioning). To this we should add a kind of children's speech ingenuity, which manifests itself in the fact that the child suddenly, completely independently, on his own initiative, begins to come up with new words,
utter phrases that he has never heard from an adult.
Topics and questions for discussion at seminars
Topic 1. Speech And its functions.
1. Speech as a means of communication and generalization.
2. Types of speech and their purpose.
3. The word as a concept.
4. The meaning and meaning of the word.
5. Theories of language acquisition and speech development.
Subject 2. Speech as a means of communication.
1. The exchange of information between living beings is the primary function of speech.
2. Communication of animals (apes) with each other.
3. The difference between human speech and animal speech.
4. The problem of the innate or acquired ability of a person to assimilate and use speech.
5. Experience of teaching animals human speech.
Subject 3. Speech as a tool of thinking.
1. The inextricable connection between thought and word.
3. Experimental proof of the existence and role of inner speech in thinking.
4. The initial period of development of thinking in a child.
Topic 4. Correlation between thinking and speech.
1. The meaning of the word as a unit of thinking and speech.
2. Inner speech and its features.
3. Egocentric speech. Discussion between L.S. Vygotsky and J. Piaget.
4. Separate and general in the development of thinking and speech.
Topics for essays
1. Types and functions of speech.
2. Communicative speech in animals.
3. The concept of inner speech.
4. The phenomenon of egocentric speech.
Themes For independent research work
1. Theory of development of language and speech.
2. The difference between human speech as a means of communication and the speech of animals.
3. The relationship between speech and thinking.
4. Development of speech and thinking.
LITERATURE
Vygotsky L.S. Collected works: In 6 volumes - T. 3. - M.,
1983. (Development of oral speech. Prehistory of written speech: 164-200. Development of speech and thinking: 254-273.)
Vygotsky L.S. Collected works: In 6 volumes - T. 2. - M.,
1982. (Thinking and Speech: 5-361.)
Vygotsky L.S. Collected works: In 6 volumes - T. 6. - M.,
1984. (Speech and practical thinking: 6-37.)
Zhinkin N.I. Speech as a conductor of information. - M., 1982. (Phoneme in language and speech: 20-28, 33-43. Sensory and language: 117-154.)
Leontyev A.N. Selected psychological works: In 2 volumes - T. 1. - M., 1983. (Psychological study of speech: 65-75.)
Lindsay P., Norman D. Information processing in humans. Introduction to Psychology. - M., 1974. (Language: 420-441.)
Luria A.R. Language and consciousness. - M., 1979. (The problem of language and consciousness: 11-30. The word and its semantic structure: 31-50. Development of the meaning of words in ontogenesis: 51-66. Development of concepts and methods of their study: 67-114. The role of speech in the course of mental processes. Regulatory function speech and its development: 115-134. Inner speech and its brain organization: 135-147. Complex forms of speech utterance. Paradigmatic components in syntagmatic structures: 165-186. Expanded speech message and its generation: 187-202. Basic forms of speech utterance . Oral (dialogue and monologue) and written speech: 203-216. Understanding the components of a speech utterance. Word and sentence: 217-234. Understanding the meaning of a complex message. Text and subtext: 235-250.)
Rubinshtein S.L. Fundamentals of general psychology: In 2 volumes - T. 1. - M., 1989. (Speech: 442-460.)
Ushakova T.N. etc. Human speech in communication. - M., 1989. (Speech as an object of psychological research: 10-60.)
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(1 Voted)Zhinkin N.I.
Speech as a conductor of information
Zhinkin N.I. Speech as a conductor of information.- M.: Nauka, 1982. - 160 p.EBook. Psycholinguistics. Neurolinguistics
Abstract (description)
Monograph Nikolai Ivanovich Zhinkin "Speech as a conductor of information" " is dedicated to research internal mechanisms speech, considered within the framework of a single self-regulatory system formed by the interaction of language, speech, intellect, in the process of communication.
