Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896–1934) - great Soviet scientist, psychologist, founder of the research tradition of studying higher psychological functions.

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The target audience

Anyone who is interested in the formation of human intelligence, the development of thinking and speech.

Vygotsky’s work examines and analyzes the problem of thinking and speech in the context of the relationship of thought to word. The author describes the phenomena he discovered that are of enormous importance for the development of the human psyche and the thinking process.

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The author sets the main objective of the research program to identify the problem and search for methods to solve it. What are the genetic roots of thinking and speech, what is the genesis of speech thinking, what is Main way development of word meanings in childhood and how one can study the development of a child’s scientific and spontaneous concepts - all this is offered by the author for study and analysis.

The problem of thinking and speech is very ancient, but far from the most developed, since various researchers have proposed only two poles of its solution: either to allow a complete merging of thought and word, or to separate them. The author chooses a method of analysis that allows the whole to be divided into units that are further indecomposable. They can be found in the meaning of the word, since this inner side of it has not been specifically studied. A word devoid of meaning cannot belong to the realm of speech, therefore meaning itself is considered both as a speech phenomenon and as belonging to the sphere of thinking.

Initially, speech has a communicative function. To create a speech message, a special preparatory process and a certain internal psychological activity are required in order to understand this message and adequately respond to it. Here the author talks about inner speech as a special sphere of mental human reality. It's different from external topics, which comes from egocentric speech (“for oneself”), and not aimed at preparing statements. Such speech is inherent in children, and it is also the carrier of their developing thought processes. This peculiar speech reality, which can be called egocentric thinking, represents the only form of existence of the child’s thoughts. And after all the transformations, thinking can become a mental process that transforms into inner speech. It has a number of features due to its abbreviated nature:

1. Speech is fragmentary and predicative.
2. The phonetic aspects are reduced in it
3. There is a predominance of verbal meaning over its meaning.

Our thoughts thus have a complex embodiment in the external form of speech for others. The child actively uses language, starting with one word, which is combined with two more, moving on to constructing a phrase and then to coherent speech based on expanded sentences. Internal semantic speech develops in the opposite direction: the child masters a whole sentence and then begins to disassemble semantic units, as if dividing a thought into a series of verbal meanings.

Vygotsky considers the concept of J. Piaget, who claims that in the development of a child’s thinking, the leading place is given to pleasure. In the process of development, the child encounters a social environment that introduces him to the way of thinking of adults. Therefore, the child learns to dissect thoughts, understand what others are saying, and respond to them in the same language. Piaget calls this method of communication the process of socialization of children's thoughts. He shows the combination of the features of logic and illogicality in him: logical thinking originates from the social life of the child, illogical thinking - from his primary childhood thoughts.

Another author, V. Stern, speaks of the beginning of the perception of reality with the perception of individual objects. The child begins to use a two-word sentence with the introduction of a predicate, then action, quality and attitude appear. But the stages of development of external speech chronologically do not coincide with the stages of children's apperception. It is the objective stage that is longer in nature, and at the action stage the connection between the external side of speech and the child’s semantic activity is chronologically broken. But at the same time, there is a logic between the child’s progress in mastering both the logical structure of speech and its external side. A turning point in speech development occurs when the child begins to actively expand his vocabulary and become interested in every new word.

Speech thinking has a heterogeneous character: speech has both verbal (external) and semantic (internal) sides. We imbue meaning into everything we talk about and extract it from what we hear, see, or read about. The meanings of children's words are constantly evolving, and this process does not end by age five. At school age, there is a quantitative growth in children's ideas and clarification of elements and connections between them. The construction of a child’s personality is closely related to the degree of development of his thinking.

The author conducted a number of experiments on the problem of concept development. The children were offered several geometric shapes with meaningless words on the back of them. The child had to select figures, developing concepts along the way and giving meaning to words. This process, in fact, is completed only by the age of 12, when a sign or word, used as a means of subordinating the adolescent’s personal psychological processes, directs him to solve problems. The development of concepts goes through three stages: syncretism, formation of a complex and the development of real concepts. At school, children’s learning always goes ahead of the level of development they have achieved, so it is important for the teacher to identify areas immediate development every student.

Best Quote

“The meaning of a word turns out to be simultaneously a speech and intellectual phenomenon, and this does not mean its purely external belonging to two different areas of mental life.”

What the book teaches

Thinking and speech have different genetic origins; their development proceeds independently of each other.

In the development of intelligence, a pre-speech phase is phylogenetically observed, and in the development of speech - a pre-intellectual phase.

It is the child who discovers the symbolic speech function.

From the editor

How to understand another person and find an approach to him? After all, for people with different ways of perceiving reality, the same word can evoke different initial images. A rhetoric teacher talks about how our psychological characteristics influence communication. Irina Mukhitdinova: .

It is believed that through changes in a person's use of certain words and expressions, one can change the course of his thoughts, behavior and mood. Why is a word so powerful and how does it affect our lives? The psychologist explains in his article. Anna Kutyavina: .

What can you do to avoid problems with thinking and speech as you age? Expert in the field of effective teaching technologies, teacher Nina Shevchuk explains that our cognitive base requires training and strengthening, and suggests several useful exercises: .

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L.S. Vygotsky: THINKING AND SPEECH

Introduction

Vygotsky Lev Semenovich (November 5 (17), 1896 - July 11, 1934) - Soviet psychologist, creator of the cultural-historical concept of the development of higher mental functions. Graduated from the Faculty of Law of Moscow University and the Faculty of History and Philosophy of the University. Shanyavsky (1917). He began his scientific and pedagogical activities in Gomel. Worked at the Moscow State Institute experimental psychology(since 1924), at the Academy of Communist Education, then at the Institute of Defectology, which he created. Professor at the Institute of Psychology in Moscow. Distinguishing two lines in the development of behavior: natural and cultural, L.S. Vygotsky put forward the position that higher, specifically human mental processes (voluntary attention, logical memory, conceptual thinking, etc.) are carried out like labor processes with the help of special tools of “spiritual production” - signs. Initially, these cultural techniques and means are formed in joint activities people, and then also become individual psychological means behavior management. In the development of each mental function, such mediation gradually turns from external to internal.

One of the main problems on the basis of which cultural-historical theory was developed is the problem of the relationship between thinking and speech. Fundamental work by L.S. Vygotsky’s “Thinking and Speech” (Moscow, 1934) is presented in the anthology in three separate articles, respectively devoted to general theoretical issues, analysis of the genetic sources of thinking and speech, structural and semantic features of inner speech (according to Chapters I, IV, VII), and research egocentric speech (chap. 11 and VII) and the problem of the development of concepts in ontogenesis (chap. V). Works: Educational psychology. M., 1926; Studies on the history of behavior. M.-L., 1930 (together with A.R. Luria); Mental development of children in the learning process. M., 1935; The problem of mental retardation.-- In the book: Mentally retarded child. M., 1935; Selected psychological studies. M., 1956; Development of higher mental functions. M., 1960; Imagination and creativity in childhood. Ed. 2nd. M., 1968; Psychology of art. Ed. 2nd. M., 1968.

1. PROBLEM AND RESEARCH METHOD

Vygotsky speech thinking mental

The problem of thinking and speech belongs to the circle of those psychological problems, in which the question of the relationship between various psychological functions and various types of consciousness activity comes to the fore. The central point of this whole problem is, of course, the question of the relationship of thought to word.

If you try in in short words to formulate the results of historical work on the problem of thinking and speech in scientific psychology, we can say that the entire solution to this problem, which was proposed by various researchers, has always and constantly fluctuated - from the most ancient times to the present day - between two extreme poles - between identification and complete fusion of thought and word and between their equally metaphysical, equally absolute, equally complete rupture and separation.

The whole question rests on the method of research, and we think that if from the very beginning we pose the problem of the relationship between thinking and speech, it is also necessary to figure out in advance what methods should be applicable in the study of this problem, which could ensure its successful resolution.

We think that we should distinguish between two types of analysis used in psychology. The study of any psychological formations necessarily involves analysis. However, this analysis may have two fundamental implications. various shapes, one of which, we think, is to blame for all the failures that researchers suffered when trying to solve this centuries-old problem, and the other is the only correct and starting point for taking at least the very first step towards its solution.

The first method of psychological analysis could be called the decomposition of complex psychological wholes into elements. It could be compared to the chemical analysis of water, decomposing it into hydrogen and oxygen. An essential feature of such an analysis is that it results in products that are alien to the analyzed whole - elements that do not contain properties inherent in the whole as such, and have a number of new properties that this whole could never discover. With a researcher who, wanting to solve the problem of thinking and speech, decomposes it into speech and thinking, exactly the same thing happens as would happen to any person who, in search of a scientific explanation of any properties of water, for example, why water extinguishes fire, or why Archimedes' law is applicable to water, I would resort to the decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen as a means of explaining these properties. He would be surprised to learn that hydrogen itself burns, and oxygen supports combustion, and would never be able to explain from the properties of these elements the properties inherent in the whole.

Nowhere were the results of this analysis reflected so clearly as in the field of the study of thinking and speech. The word itself, which is a living unity of sound and meaning and contains, like a living cell, in its simplest form all the basic properties inherent in speech thinking as a whole, as a result of such an analysis turned out to be split into two parts, between which researchers then tried to establish an external mechanical associative connection.

We think that the decisive and turning point in the entire doctrine of thinking and speech is the transition from this analysis to an analysis of another kind. We could designate this latter as analysis, dividing a complex whole into units. By unit we mean such a product of analysis which, unlike the elements, has all the basic properties inherent in the whole, and which are further indecomposable living parts of this unity. Not the chemical formula of water, but the study of molecules and molecular motion is the key to explaining the individual properties of water. Likewise, a living cell, preserving all the basic properties of life inherent in a living organism, is a real unit of biological analysis. Psychology that wishes to study complex unities needs to understand this. It must find these indecomposable, preserving properties inherent in a given whole as a unity of a unit, in which these properties are represented in the opposite form, and with the help of such an analysis try to resolve the specific questions that arise before it. What is such a unit that is further indecomposable and which contains the properties inherent in speech thinking as a whole? We think that such a unit can be found in the inner side of the word - in its meaning.

In a word, we have always known only one of its external sides, facing us. Meanwhile, in its other, inner side, there is hidden precisely the possibility of resolving the problems that interest us about the relationship between thinking and speech, for it is in the meaning of the word that the knot of that unity that we call speech thinking is tied.

A word always refers not to one particular object, but to a whole group or to a whole class of objects. Because of this, every word is a hidden generalization, every word already generalizes, and from a psychological point of view, the meaning of a word is, first of all, a generalization. But generalization, as is easy to see, is an extremely complex act of thought, reflecting reality in a completely different way than it is reflected in immediate sensations and perceptions. The qualitative difference between the unit and the main thing is a generalized reflection of reality. Because of this, we can conclude that the meaning of the word that we have just tried to reveal from the psychological side, its generalization is an act of thinking in the proper sense of the word.

But at the same time, meaning is an integral part of the word as such; it belongs to the kingdom of speech as much as to the kingdom of thought. A word without meaning is not a word, but an empty sound. A word devoid of meaning no longer belongs to the realm of speech. Therefore, meaning can equally be considered both as a speech phenomenon in nature and as a phenomenon related to the field of thinking. It is speech and thinking at the same time, because it is a unit of speech thinking. If this is so, then it is obvious that the method of studying the problem that interests us cannot be other than the method of semantic analysis, the method of analyzing the semantic side of speech, the method of studying verbal meaning. By studying the development, functioning, structure, and general movement of this unit, we can learn much that the question of the relationship between thinking and speech, the question of the nature of verbal thinking, can clarify for us. The primary function of speech is the communicative function. Speech is first and foremost a means social communication, a means of expression and understanding. This function of speech was usually also separated from the intellectual function of speech in analysis, breaking it down into elements, and both functions were attributed to speech as if in parallel and independently of each other. Speech seemed to combine both the functions of communication and the functions of thinking, but in what relation these two functions stand to each other, how their development occurs and how both are structurally united with each other - all this remained and still remains unexplored. Meanwhile, the meaning of a word represents as much a unit of these two functions of speech as it does a unit of thinking. That direct communication of souls is impossible is, of course, an axiom for scientific psychology. It is also known that communication, not mediated by speech or any other system of signs or means of communication, as is observed in the animal world, makes possible only communication of the most primitive type and in the most limited extent. In essence, this communication through expressive movements does not even deserve the name of communication, but rather should be called contagion. A frightened gander, seeing danger and raising the whole flock with a cry, not only informs it of what he saw, but rather infects it with his fear. Communication, based on rational understanding and on the intentional transmission of thoughts and experiences, certainly requires a certain system of means, the prototype of which was, is and will always remain human speech, which arose from the need for communication in the process of work.

In order to convey any experience or content of consciousness to another person, there is no other way than to attribute the transmitted content to a certain class of phenomena, and this, as we already know, certainly requires generalization.

Thus, it turns out that communication necessarily involves generalization, the development of verbal meaning, i.e. generalization becomes possible with the development of communication. Thus, the highest forms of psychological communication inherent to a person are possible only due to the fact that a person, with the help of thinking, generally reflects reality.

It is worth turning to any example in order to be convinced of this connection between communication and generalization, these two main functions of speech. I want to tell someone that I'm cold.

I can make him understand this with the help of a series of expressive movements, but real understanding and communication will take place only when I am able to generalize and name what I am experiencing, that is, to attribute the feeling of cold that I experience to a certain class of states, familiar to my interlocutor. That is why the whole thing is incommunicable to children who do not yet have a known generalization. The point here is not a lack of appropriate words and sounds, but a lack of appropriate concepts and Generalizations, without which understanding is impossible. As Tolstoy says, it is almost always not the word itself that is incomprehensible, but the concept that is expressed by the word.

The word is almost always ready when the concept is ready. Therefore, there is every reason to consider the meaning of a word not only as a unity of thinking and speech, but also as a unity of generalization and communication, communication and thinking. The fundamental significance of such a formulation of the question for all genetic problems of thinking and speech is completely immeasurable. It lies primarily in the fact that only with this assumption does a causal-genetic analysis of thinking and speech become possible for the first time.

2. GENETIC ROOTS OF THINKING AND SPEECH

The main fact that we encounter in the genetic examination of thinking and speech is that the relationship between these processes is not a constant value, unchanged throughout development, but a variable value. Development curves repeatedly converge and diverge, intersect, level out in certain periods and run in parallel, even merge in some of their parts, then branch out again.

This is true for both phylogeny and ontogeny. It should be said first of all that thinking and speech are genetically completely various roots. (This fact can be considered firmly established by a number of studies in the field of animal psychology. The development of one and the other function not only has different roots, but also proceeds along different lines throughout the entire animal kingdom.

Crucial to establishing this fact of primary importance are studies of the intelligence and speech of great apes, especially the studies of Koehler (1921) and Yerkes (1925).

In Köhler's experiments we have absolutely clear evidence that the rudiments of intelligence, that is, thinking in the proper sense of the word, appear in animals independently of the development of speech and not at all in connection with its success. The “inventions” of monkeys, expressed in the manufacture and use of tools and in the use of “workarounds” in solving problems, constitute the primary phase in the development of thinking, but a pre-speech phase.

The absence of speech and the limitation of "trace stimuli", so-called "representations", are the main reasons why the greatest difference exists between the anthropoid and the most primitive man. Koehler says: “The absence of this infinitely valuable technical aid(language) and the fundamental limitations of the most important intellectual material, the so-called “ideas,” are therefore the reasons why even the slightest rudiments of cultural development are impossible for chimpanzees.”

The presence of human-like intelligence in the absence of speech that is somewhat human-like in this regard and the independence of intellectual operations from its “speech” - this could be a concise formulation of the main conclusion that can be drawn regarding the problem of interest to us from Köhler’s research.

Köhler, with the precision of experimental analysis, showed that the presence of an optically relevant situation is decisive for the behavior of chimpanzees. Two provisions can be considered undoubted in any case. First: the rational use of speech is an intellectual function, under no circumstances determined directly by the optical structure. Second: in all tasks that affected not optically actual structures, but structures of a different kind (mechanical, for example), chimpanzees switched from an intellectual type of behavior to a pure trial and error method. Such a simple operation from a human point of view, such as the task of placing one box on top of another and maintaining balance at the same time, or removing a ring from a nail, turns out to be almost inaccessible to the “naive statics” and mechanics of chimpanzees. From these two provisions it follows with logical inevitability that the assumption that it is possible for chimpanzees to master the use of human speech is, from a psychological point of view, highly unlikely.

But the matter would be solved extremely simply if we really did not find any rudiments of speech in monkeys. In fact, we find in chimpanzees a relatively highly developed “speech”, in some respects (especially phonetically) human-like. And the most remarkable thing is that chimpanzee speech and intelligence function independently of each other. Köhler writes about the “speech” of chimpanzees, which he observed for many years at the anthropoid station on the island. Tenerife: “Their phonetic manifestations, without any exception, express only their aspirations and subjective states; therefore, these are emotional expressions, but never a sign of something “objective” (Köhler, 1921).

Köhler described extremely diverse forms of “verbal communication” between chimpanzees. In the first place should be placed emotional and expressive movements, which are very bright and rich in chimpanzees (facial expressions and gestures, sound reactions). Next come expressive movements of social emotions (gestures when greeting, etc.). But “their gestures,” says Koehler, “like their expressive sounds, never designate or describe anything objective.”

Animals perfectly “understand” each other’s facial expressions and gestures. With the help of gestures, they “express” not only their emotional states, says Koehler, but also desires and impulses directed towards other objects. The most common way in such cases is for the chimpanzee to initiate the movement or action that it wants to produce or to which the other animal wants to induce (pushing the other animal and initial walking movements when the chimpanzee “calls” it to come with it; grasping movements when a monkey wants to get bananas from another, etc.). All these are gestures directly related to the action itself.

We may now be interested in establishing three points in connection with the characteristics of chimpanzee speech. First: this connection of speech with expressive emotional movements, which becomes especially clear in moments of strong affective arousal of chimpanzees, does not represent any specific feature of anthropoid apes. On the contrary, it is rather an extremely common feature for animals with a vocal apparatus. And this same form of expressive vocal reactions undoubtedly underlies the emergence and development of human speech.

Second: emotional states represent a sphere of behavior in chimpanzees, rich in speech manifestations and extremely unfavorable for the functioning of intellectual reactions. Köhler notes many times how emotional and especially affective reactions completely destroy the intellectual operation of the chimpanzee.

And third: the emotional side does not exhaust the function of speech in chimpanzees, and this also does not represent the exclusive property of the speech of anthropoid apes; it also makes their speech similar to the language of many other animal species and also constitutes the undoubted genetic root of the corresponding function of human speech. Speech is not only an expressive-emotional reaction, but also a means of psychological contact with others like oneself. Both the monkeys observed by Köhler and the Yerkes chimpanzees exhibit this function of speech with absolute certainty. However, this function of communication or contact is in no way connected with the intellectual reaction, i.e., the thinking of the animal. Least of all, this reaction can resemble an intentional, meaningful message of something or the same impact. Essentially, it is an instinctive reaction, or at least something extremely close to it.

We can take stock. We were interested in the relationship between thinking and speech in the phylogenetic development of both functions. To find out this, we resorted to an analysis of experimental studies and observations of the language and intelligence of apes. We can briefly formulate the main conclusions.

1. Thinking and speech have different genetic roots.

2. The development of thinking and speech occurs along different lines and independently of each other.

3. The relationship between thinking and speech is not at all constant throughout phylogenetic development.

4. Anthropoids display human-like intelligence in some respects (the rudiments of using tools) and human-like speech in completely different respects (emotional speech phonetics and the rudiments social function speech).

5. Anthropoids do not exhibit the characteristic human relationship - the close connection between thinking and speech. The one and the other are not in any way directly related in chimpanzees.

6. In the phylogenesis of thinking and speech, we can undoubtedly state a pre-speech phase in the development of intelligence and a pre-intellectual phase in the development of speech.

In ontogenesis, the relationship between both lines of development - thinking and speech - is much more vague and confused. However, even here, completely leaving aside any question about the parallelism of onto- and phylogeny or about another, more complex relationship between them, we can establish different genetic roots and different lines in the development of thinking and speech.

Recently, we have received experimental evidence that a child’s thinking in its development passes through a pre-linguistic stage. Köhler's experiments on chimpanzees were transferred with appropriate modifications to a child who did not yet speak speech. Köhler himself repeatedly involved a child in the experiment for comparison. Bühler systematically examined the child in this regard.

“These were actions,” he says of his experiments, “exactly similar to the actions of a chimpanzee, and therefore this phase of a child’s life can quite aptly be called the chimpanzee-like age; This child had his last hug at the 10th, 11th and 12th months. “At a chimpanzee-like age, the child makes his first inventions, which are, of course, extremely primitive, but in a spiritual sense extremely important” (Bühler, 1924).

What is theoretically of greatest importance in these experiments is the independence of the rudiments of intellectual reactions from speech. Noting this, Bühler writes: “They said that speech begins at the beginning of human development; maybe, but before it there is still instrumental thinking, i.e. understanding mechanical connections, and the inventing of mechanical means for mechanical ends."

The pre-intellectual roots of speech in child development were established a long time ago. Crying, babbling, and even a child's first words are stages in the development of speech, but pre-intellectual stages. They have nothing to do with the development of thinking.

The generally accepted view considered children's speech at this stage of its development as an emotional form of behavior par excellence. The latest research (S. Bühler et al. - the first forms of social behavior of the child and the inventory of his reactions in the first year, and her collaborators Getzer and Tuder-Hart - the child’s early reactions to the human voice) have shown that in the first year of a child’s life, t .e. It is precisely at the pre-intellectual stage of the development of his speech that we find a rich development of the social function of speech.

The child's relatively complex and rich social contacts lead to an extremely early development of “communications.” It was undoubtedly possible to establish unambiguous specific reactions to the human voice in a child already in the third week of life (presocial reactions) and the first social reaction to the human voice in the second month. Likewise, laughter, babbling, pointing, and gestures in the very first months of a child’s life act as means of social contact.

We thus find that in a child of the first year of life, those two functions of speech that are familiar to us from phylogenesis are already clearly expressed.

But the most important thing that we know about the development of thinking and speech in a child is that at a certain moment, occurring at an early age (about 2 years), the lines of development of thinking and speech, which have hitherto been separate, intersect and coincide in their development and give rise to a completely new form of behavior, so characteristic of humans.

V. Stern described this most important event in the psychological development of a child better and earlier than others. He showed how a child “awakens a dark consciousness of the meaning of language and the will to conquer it.” The child at this time, as Stern says, makes the greatest discovery in his life. He discovers that “every thing has its own name” (Stern, 1922).

This turning point, from which speech becomes intellectual and thinking becomes verbal, is characterized by two completely undoubted and objective signs by which we can reliably judge whether this turning point has occurred in the development of speech. Both of these points are closely related.

The first is that the child who has had this fracture begins to actively expand his vocabulary, his stock of words, ask about each new thing: what is it called. The second point is the extremely rapid, abrupt increase in the vocabulary that arises based on the active expansion of the child’s vocabulary.

As is known, an animal can learn individual words of human speech and apply them in appropriate situations. Before the onset of this period, the child also learns individual words, which are for him conditioned stimuli or substitutes for individual objects, people, actions, states, desires. However, at this stage the child knows as many words as are given to him by the people around him.

Now the situation is becoming fundamentally completely different. The child himself needs a word and actively strives to master the sign that belongs to the object, a sign that serves for naming and communication. If the first stage in the development of children's speech, as Meiman rightly showed, is affective-volitional in its psychological significance, then from this moment speech enters the intellectual phase of its development. The child, as it were, discovers the symbolic function of speech.

Here it is important for us to note one fundamentally important point: only at a certain, relatively high stage of development of thinking and speech, “the greatest discovery in a child’s life” becomes possible. In order to “open” speech, you need to think.

We can briefly formulate our conclusions:

1. In the ontogenetic development of thinking and speech, we also find different roots of both processes.

2. In the development of a child’s speech, we can undoubtedly ascertain the “pre-intellectual stage”, just as in the development of thinking - the “pre-speech stage”.

3. Up to a certain point, both developments proceed along different lines, independently of one another.

4. At a certain point, both lines intersect, after which thinking becomes verbal, and speech becomes intellectual.

We are approaching the formulation of the main proposition of our entire article, a proposition that has extremely important methodological significance for the entire formulation of the problem. This conclusion follows from a comparison of the development of verbal thinking with the development of speech and intelligence, as it occurred in the animal world and in very early childhood along special, separate lines. This comparison shows that one development is not just a direct continuation of another, but that the very type of development has changed. Speech thinking is not a natural, natural form of behavior, but a socio-historical form, and therefore distinguished mainly by a number of specific properties and patterns that cannot be discovered in natural forms of thinking and speech.

3. THOUGHT AND WORD

The new and most significant thing that this study brings to the doctrine of thinking and speech is the revelation that the meanings of words develop. The discovery of changes in the meanings of words and their development is our main discovery, which allows us for the first time to finally overcome the postulate about the constancy and immutability of the meaning of a word, which underlay all previous teachings about thinking and speech.

The meaning of the word is not constant. It changes as the child develops. It also changes with different ways of functioning of thought. It is a dynamic rather than a static formation. Establishing the variability of meanings became possible only when the nature of the meaning itself was correctly determined. Its nature is revealed primarily in generalization, which is contained as the main and central point in every word, for every word already generalizes.

But since the meaning of a word can change in its internal nature, it means that the relationship of thought to the word also changes! In order to understand the dynamics of the relationship between thought and word, it is necessary to introduce a kind of cross-section into the genetic scheme of changes in meanings that we developed in the main study. It is necessary to clarify the functional role of verbal meaning in the act of thinking.

Let us now try to imagine in its entirety the complex structure of any real thought process and its associated complex flow from the first, most vague moment of the origin of a thought to its final completion in verbal formulation. To do this, we must move from the genetic plane to the functional plane and outline not the process of development of meanings and changes in their structure, but the process of the functioning of meanings in the living course of verbal thinking.

Before moving on to a schematic description of this process, we, anticipating the results of further presentation, will say something about the basic and guiding idea, the development and explanation of which should serve as all subsequent research. This central idea can be expressed in a general formula: the relation of thought to word is, first of all, not a thing, but a process; this relation is a movement from thought to word and back - from word to thought. This relationship appears in the light of psychological analysis as a developing process. Of course, this is not age-related development, but functional, but the movement of the thinking process itself from thought to word is development. Thought is not expressed in words, but is accomplished in words. Therefore, one could talk about the formation (unity of being and non-being) of thought in the word. Every thought strives to connect something with something, to establish a relationship between something and something. Every thought has movement, flow, development, in a word, thought performs some function, some work, solves some problem. This flow of thought occurs as an internal movement through a whole series of planes, as the transition of thought into word and word into thought. Therefore, the primary task of analysis, which wants to study the relationship of thought to word as a movement from thought to word, is to study the phases from which this movement is composed, to distinguish a number of planes through which the thought, embodied in the word, passes. Here many things are revealed to the researcher “that the sages never dreamed of.”

First of all, our analysis leads us to distinguish between two plans in speech itself. The study shows that the internal, semantic, semantic side of speech and the external, sounding phasic side of speech, although they form a true unity, each have their own special laws of movement. The unity of speech is a complex unity, and not a homogeneous and homogeneous one. First of all, the presence of its own movement in the semantic and phasic aspects of speech is revealed from a number of facts related to the field speech development child. Let us point out only two main facts.

It is known that the external aspect of speech develops in a child from three words, then to a simple phrase and to a chain of phrases, and even later to complex sentences and to speech. But it is also known that in terms of its meaning, the child’s first word is a whole phrase - a one-syllable sentence. In the development of the semantic side of speech, the child begins with a sentence, and only later moves on to mastering private semantic units, the meanings of individual words, dividing his continuous thought, expressed in a one-word sentence, into a number of separate, interconnected verbal meanings. Thus, if we cover the initial and final moments in the development of the semantic and phasic aspects of speech, we can easily be convinced that this development goes in opposite directions. The semantic side of speech develops from the whole to the part, from sentence to word, and the external side of speech goes from part to whole, from word to sentence.

Another, no less important fact relates to a later era of development. Piaget found that a child masters a complex structure earlier subordinate clause with conjunctions: “because”, “despite”, “since”, “although” than with semantic structures corresponding to these syntactic forms. Grammar in a child's development goes ahead of his logic. A child who completely correctly and adequately uses conjunctions expressing cause-and-effect, temporal and other dependencies in his spontaneous speech and in the appropriate situation does not yet realize the semantic side of these conjunctions and does not know how to use it voluntarily. This means that the movements of the semantic and phasic aspects of a word in mastering complex syntactic structures do not coincide in development.

Less directly, but even more clearly, is the discrepancy between the semantic and phasic aspects of speech in the functioning of developed thought.

Of the entire series of facts related here, the first place should be given to the discrepancy between the grammatical and psychological subject and predicate.

This discrepancy between the grammatical and psychological subject and predicate can be illustrated with the following example. Let’s take the phrase: “The clock fell,” in which “the clock” is the subject, “fell” is the predicate, and imagine that this phrase is pronounced twice in a different situation and, therefore, expresses two different thoughts in the same form . I notice that the clock is standing and ask how this happened. They answer me: “The clock has fallen.” In this case, in my mind there used to be an idea of ​​a clock; the clock is in this case the psychological subject, what is being said. The second idea that arose was that they had fallen. “Fell” is in this case a psychological predicate, what is said about the subject. In this case, the grammatical and psychological division of the phrase coincides, but it may not coincide.

While working at my desk, I hear a noise from an object falling and I ask what fell. They answer me with the same phrase: “The clock has fallen.” In this case, the consciousness previously had the idea of ​​​​the fallen. “Fell” is what this phrase is talking about, i.e., the psychological subject. What is said about this subject; what appears second in consciousness is the idea of ​​a clock, which in this case will be the psychological predicate. In essence, this idea could be expressed this way: what fell is a watch. In this case, both the psychological and grammatical predicate would coincide, but in our case they do not coincide. Analysis shows that in a complex phrase any member of a sentence can become a psychological predicate. In this case, it bears a logical emphasis, the semantic function of which is precisely to highlight the psychological predicate.

If we try to summarize what we have learned from the analysis of the two plans of speech, we can say that the presence of a second, internal plan of speech behind the words forces us to see in the simplest speech utterance a more than once forever given, fixed relationship between the semantic and sound sides speech, but movement, the transition from the syntax of meaning to verbal syntax, the transformation of the grammar of thought into the grammar of words, the modification of the semantic structure when it is embodied in words.

But we must take another step along the path we have outlined and penetrate even deeper into the inner side of speech. The semantic plane of speech is only the initial of all its internal planes. Behind it, the plan of inner speech is revealed before the study. Without a correct understanding of the psychological nature of inner speech, there is and cannot be any possibility of elucidating the relationship of thought to word in all its actual complexity.

Since our assumption that egocentric speech represents early forms of inner speech is trustworthy, we thereby resolve the question of a method for studying inner speech. The study of the child’s egocentric speech is in this case the key to studying the psychological nature of inner speech.

We can now move on to a concise description of the third of the plans we have outlined for the movement from thought to word - the plan of inner speech.

First and main feature inner speech is its very special syntax. While studying the syntax of inner speech in a child’s egocentric speech, we noticed one significant feature that reveals an undoubted dynamic tendency to increase as egocentric speech develops. This feature lies in the apparent fragmentation, fragmentation, and shortness of internal speech compared to external...

As a general law, we could say that internal speech, as it develops, reveals not a simple tendency to shorten and omit words] not a simple transition to a telegraphic style, but a completely unique tendency to shorten phrases and sentences in the direction of preserving the predicate and those related to it parts of a sentence by omitting the subject and related words. Using the interpolation method, we must assume pure and absolute predicativity as the basic syntactic form of inner speech.

A completely similar situation is created in a situation where the subject of the judgment being expressed is known in advance to the interlocutors. Let's imagine that several people are waiting at a tram stop for tram "B" in order to go in a certain direction. Never will any of these people, having noticed an approaching tram, say in expanded form: “Tram “B”, which we are waiting for in order to go somewhere, is coming,” but the statement will always be reduced to one predicate: “It is coming.” "or "B". (See the article by L.S. Vygotsky "On the nature of egocentric speech" in this anthology.)

We find striking examples of such abbreviations of external speech and its reduction to single predicates in the novels of Tolstoy, who more than once returned to the psychology of understanding. “No one heard what he (the dying Nikolai Levin) said, only Kitty understood. She understood because she never stopped thinking about what he needed.” We could say that in her thoughts, following the thought of the dying man, there was the subject to which his word, which no one understood, referred to. But perhaps the most remarkable example is the explanation of Kitty and Levin through the initial letters of words. “I’ve been wanting to ask you one thing for a long time.” - “Please ask.” “Here,” he said and wrote the initial letters: K, V, M, O, E, N, M, B, 3, L, E, N, I, T. These letters meant: When you told me They answered: this cannot be, whether that meant never or then.” There was no way that she could understand this complex phrase. “I understand,” she said, blushing. “What word is this? - he said, pointing to the “N”, which stood for the word never. “This word means ‘never,’” she said, “but it’s not true.” He quickly erased what he had written, handed her the chalk and stood up. She wrote: “T, I, N, M, I, O.” He suddenly beamed: he understood. It meant: “Then I couldn’t answer otherwise.” She wrote the initial letters: “CH, V, M, 3, I, P, CH, B.” It meant: “So that you can forget and forgive what happened." He grabbed the chalk with tense, trembling fingers and, breaking it, wrote the initial letters of the following: "I have nothing to forget or forgive. I never stopped loving you." - "I understand," she said in a whisper. He sat down and wrote a long phrase. She understood everything and, without asking him, she took the chalk and answered immediately. For a long time he could not understand what she wrote, and often looked into her eyes. An eclipse came over him from happiness. He could not put in the words that she understood, but in her lovely eyes, shining with happiness, he understood everything he needed to know. And he wrote three letters. But he had not yet finished writing, and she was already reading I finished it with his hand and wrote the answer: yes. In their conversation everything was said: it was said that she loved him and that she would tell her father and mother that he would arrive tomorrow morning” (“Anna Karenina”, part 4, chapter XIII).

This example has absolutely exceptional psychological significance because it, like the entire episode of Levin and Kitty’s declaration of love, was borrowed by Tolstoy from his biography. It was in this way that he himself declared his love to S.A. Bers, his future wife. When the thoughts of the interlocutors are the same, when the direction of their consciousness is the same, the role of speech irritations is reduced to a minimum. But meanwhile, understanding occurs unmistakably. Tolstoy draws attention in another work to the fact that between people living in very great psychological contact, such an understanding with the help of only abbreviated speech at a glance is the rule rather than the exception.

Having studied the phenomenon of abbreviation in external speech using these examples, we can return enriched to the same phenomenon of interest to us in internal speech. Here this phenomenon manifests itself not only in exceptional situations, but always when the functioning of inner speech takes place.

The whole point is that the same circumstances that sometimes create the possibility of purely predicative judgments in oral speech and which are completely absent in written speech are constant and unchanging companions of inner speech, inseparable from it.

Let's take a closer look at these circumstances. Let us recall once again that in oral speech contractions occur when the subject of the judgment being expressed is known in advance to both interlocutors. But this state of affairs is an absolute and constant law for inner speech. The topic of our internal dialogue always known to us. The subject of our internal judgment is always present in our thoughts. It is always implied. Piaget once notes that we easily take ourselves at our word and that therefore the need for evidence and the ability to substantiate our thoughts are born only in the process of the collision of our thoughts with other people's thoughts. With the same right, we could say that we especially easily understand ourselves from a half-word, from a hint. Alone with ourselves, we never need to resort to detailed formulations. Here, only the predicate always turns out to be necessary and sufficient. The subject always remains in the mind, just as a schoolchild leaves in the mind the remainders that go beyond ten when adding.

Moreover, in our inner speech we always boldly speak our thoughts, without giving ourselves the trouble to put them into precise words. The mental closeness of the interlocutors, as shown above, creates a commonality of apperception among speakers, which, in turn, is the determining factor for the abbreviation of speech. But this community of apperception when communicating with oneself is complete, complete and absolute, therefore in inner speech the law is that laconic and clear almost without words, communication of the most complex thoughts, which Tolstoy speaks of as a rare exception in oral speech, possible only then, when there is a deeply intimate inner closeness between speakers. In inner speech we never need to name what is being talked about, i.e. subject. This leads to the dominance of pure predicativity in internal speech.

But the predicative nature of internal speech does not yet exhaust the entire complex of phenomena that finds its external summary expression in the shortness of internal speech compared to oral speech. We should also mention the reduction of phonetic aspects of speech, which we have already encountered in some cases of abbreviation of oral speech. The explanation of Kitty and Levin allowed us to conclude that with the same orientation of consciousness, the role of speech stimulation is reduced to a minimum (initial letters), and understanding occurs unmistakably. But this minimization of the role of speech stimuli is again taken to the limit and is observed almost in absolute form in inner speech, for the same direction of consciousness here reaches its fullness.

Inner speech is, in the precise sense, speech almost without words. We must take a closer look at the third source of abbreviation that interests us. We find this third source in the completely unique semantic structure of inner speech. As the study shows, the syntax of meaning and the entire structure of the semantic side of speech are no less unique than the syntax of words and its sound structure.

In our research, we were able to establish three main features that are internally interconnected and form the uniqueness of inner speech. The first of them is the predominance of the meaning of the word over the meaning in internal speech. Polan rendered a great service to the psychological analysis of speech by introducing the distinction between the meaning of a word and its meaning. The meaning of a word, as Polan showed, is the totality of all psychological facts that arise in our consciousness thanks to the word. The meaning of a word thus turns out to be always a dynamic, fluid, complex formation that has several zones of varying stability. Meaning is only one of the zones of the meaning that a word acquires in the context of any speech, and, moreover, the zone that is the most stable, unified and accurate. The real meaning of a word is not constant. In one operation a word appears with one meaning, in another it takes on a different meaning. This dynamism of meaning leads us to Polan’s problem, to the question of the relationship between meaning and meaning. The meaning of a word is nothing more than potency, realized in living speech, in which this meaning is only a stone in the building of meaning.

We will explain this difference between the meaning and meaning of a word using the example of the final word of Krylov’s fable “The Dragonfly and the Ant.” The word "poplyashi" with which this fable ends has a very definite constant meaning, the same for any context in which it occurs. But in the context of a fable, it takes on a much broader intellectual and affective meaning. It already means in this context both “have fun” and “perish.” This enrichment of a word with meaning, which it absorbs from the entire context, constitutes the basic law of the dynamics of meanings. The word absorbs, absorbs from the entire context in which it is woven, intellectual and affective contents and begins to mean more and less than is contained in its meaning: more - because the circle of its meanings expands, acquiring a whole series of zones filled with new content; less - because the abstract meaning of a word is limited and narrowed by what the word means only in a given context. The meaning of a word, says Polan, is a complex, mobile phenomenon, constantly changing to a certain extent in accordance with individual consciousnesses and for the same consciousness in accordance with circumstances. In this regard, the meaning of the word is inexhaustible. A word acquires its meaning only in a phrase, but the phrase itself acquires meaning only in the context of a paragraph, a paragraph in the context of a book, a book in the context of the author’s entire work. The actual meaning of each word is ultimately determined by the entire wealth of moments existing in consciousness that relate to what is expressed by the given word.

But main merit Polan lies in the fact that he analyzed the relationship between meaning and word and was able to show that between meaning and word there are much more independent relationships than between meaning and word. Words can become dissociated from the meaning expressed in them. It has long been known that words can change their meaning. More recently, it was noticed that we should also study how meanings change words, or, more accurately, how concepts change their names. Polan gives many examples of how words remain when the meaning evaporates. He analyzes stereotypical everyday phrases (for example: “how are you”), lies and other manifestations of the independence of words from meaning. The meaning can also be separated from the word expressing it, just as it can easily be fixed in any other word. Just as, he says, the meaning of a word is connected with the entire word as a whole, but not with each of its sounds, so the meaning of a phrase is connected with the entire phrase as a whole, but not with the words that make it up individually. Therefore, it happens that one word takes the place of another. The meaning is separated from the word and thus preserved. But if a word can exist without meaning, meaning can equally exist without words.

In oral speech, as a rule, we proceed from the most stable and constant element of meaning, from its most constant zone, i.e. from the meaning of a word to its more fluid zones, to its meaning as a whole. In inner speech, on the contrary, the predominance of sense over meaning, which we observe in oral speech in individual cases as a more or less weakly expressed tendency, is brought to its limit and presented in absolute form. Here the predominance of a phrase over a word, of the entire context over a phrase, is not an exception, but a constant rule. Two other features of the semantics of inner speech follow from this circumstance. They both deal with the process of putting words together, combining them, and merging them. Of these, the first can be related to agglutination, which is observed in some languages ​​as a basic phenomenon, and in others as a more or less rarely encountered way of combining words. IN German For example, a single noun is often formed from a whole phrase or from several individual words, which in this case act in the functional meaning of a single word. In other languages, this merging of words is observed as a constantly operating mechanism.

There are two remarkable things about this: firstly, the fact that individual words included in a compound word often undergo abbreviations from the sound side, so that from them into compound word part of the word is included, secondly, the fact that the complex word arising in this way, expressing a very complex concept, appears from the functional and structural side as a single word, and not as a combination of independent words. In American languages, says Wundt, a compound word is treated in exactly the same way as a simple word, and is inflected and conjugated in exactly the same way. We observed something similar in the egocentric speech of a child. As this form of speech approaches inner speech, the child in his utterances increasingly reveals, in parallel with the fall in the coefficient of egocentric speech, a tendency towards asyntactic sticking together of words.

The third and last feature of the semantics of inner speech can again be most easily understood by comparison with a similar phenomenon in oral speech. Its essence lies in the fact that the meanings of words, more dynamic and broader than their meanings, reveal different laws of unification and merging with each other than those that can be observed during the unification and merging of verbal meanings. The meanings seem to flow into each other and seem to influence each other, so that the preceding ones seem to be contained in the subsequent one or modify it. We see this especially often in artistic speech. A word, passing through any work of art, absorbs all the diversity of semantic units contained in it and becomes, in its meaning, equivalent to the entire work as a whole. This is especially easy to explain using the names as an example. works of art. Words such as Don Quixote and Hamlet, Eugene Onegin and Anna Karenina express this law of the influence of meaning in the most pure form. Here, one word contains the semantic content of an entire work. A particularly clear example of this law is the title of Gogol’s poem “ Dead Souls" The original meaning of this word means deceased serfs who have not yet been excluded from the revision lists and therefore can be subject to purchase and sale, like living peasants. But, passing like a red thread through the entire fabric of the poem, these two words absorb a completely new, immeasurably richer meaning and mean something completely different compared to their original meaning. Dead souls are not serfs who have died and are considered alive, but all the heroes of the poem who live but are spiritually dead.

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Study of concept development.

Until recently, the main difficulty in the field of concept development was the lack of development of a special methodology with the help of which it would be possible to study the process of concept formation and explore its psychological nature.

All traditional methods of studying concepts are divided into two main groups. A typical representative of the first group is the determination method and all its variations. The main thing for him is the study of the child’s already formed concepts using a verbal definition of their content. It is for this reason that this method has been included in most test studies.

But, despite its prevalence, it has two significant disadvantages:

1. He deals with the result of an already completed process of concept formation, without capturing the dynamics of the process, its development, flow, beginning and end. The determination method is an examination of the product rather than the process that leads to the formation of that product. In this regard, when defining ready-made concepts, we very often deal not so much with the child’s thinking, but with the reproduction of ready-made knowledge. When studying the definitions that a child gives to this or that concept, the greatest attention is paid to the child’s experience, the degree of his speech development, and not to thinking in the literal sense of the word.

2. The method of definition operates exclusively with words, forgetting that concepts, and especially for a child, are associated with the sensory material from the perception and processing of which it is born; sensitive material and the word are necessary moments in the process of concept formation, and the word translates the entire process of defining a concept into a purely verbal plane, which is not typical for a child. Consequently, with the help of this method it is not possible to establish the relationship that exists between the meaning given by the child to the word with a purely verbal definition.

The most essential thing for a concept (the relationship to its reality) remains unstudied. We try to approach the meaning of a word through another word, and what we hide with the help of this operation should be attributed to relationships, and not to the actual reflection of children's concepts.

The second group of methods includes studies that try to overcome the shortcomings of the verbal method of definition and that try to study the psychological functions and processes underlying the process of concept formation. All of them confront the child with the task of identifying some common feature in a number of specific impressions or abstracting this feature from a number of others merged with him in the process of perception, and generalizing a whole series of impressions according to a feature common to him.

But the second group also has its drawback. This is that all the methods of this group substitute an elementary process that is part of it in place of a complex process, but at the same time ignore the role of the word in the process of concept formation, thereby simplifying the process of abstraction itself, taking it outside the relationship with the word that is characteristic of the formation of concepts, which is the central feature of the entire process.

Thus, traditional research methods operate either with words without objective material, or, conversely, with objective material without words.

A huge step forward in the study of concepts was the creation of a special methodology that attempted to adequately reflect the process of concept formation, which includes two important points: the material on the basis of which the concept is developed, and the word with the help of which it arises.

The main principle of this method is the introduction into the experiment of artificial words (at first they are meaningless for the subject), which are not related to the child’s previous experience. In addition, a number of artificial concepts are introduced, which are composed specifically for experimental purposes by combining a number of features that, in such a combination, are not found in the world of everyday concepts denoted by speech.

As this research progresses, the process of comprehending a meaningless word, acquiring meaning by the word, and developing a concept unfolds. Thanks to this introduction of artificial words and concepts, this method is freed from one of the most significant drawbacks of a number of methods, namely: to solve the problem facing the subject in the experiment, the use of previous experience and previous knowledge is not assumed, which equates an early child and an adult.

One of the main disadvantages of the definition method is that the concept is taken out of connection with the real thinking processes in which it occurs. For example: The experimenter takes some (isolated) word, and the child must define it, but this definition does not in the least say what this concept is in action, how the child operates with it in the living process of solving a problem, how he uses them, when this becomes necessary.

This ignoring of the functional aspect is a failure to take into account the fact that a concept does not live an isolated life and is always found in a living, complex process of thinking, and always performs various functions (understanding, comprehension, solving a problem).

Research conducted by scientists in this area has led to the establishment of the main factor that determines the entire course of the process of concept formation as a whole. In their opinion, such a factor is determining tendency. Psychologists use this term to designate a tendency that regulates the flow of our ideas and actions. Previously, psychologists distinguished two main tendencies: 1) reproductive (associative) and 2) perseverative tendency.

The first of these means the tendency to evoke in the course of representations those of them which in previous experience were associatively connected with the data, and the second, in turn, indicates the tendency of each representation to return and penetrate again during the representations. However, both of these tendencies are insufficient to explain purposeful acts of thinking aimed at solving a problem.

The study of concepts shows that the central point, without which a new concept will never arise, is the regulating action of the determining tendency, which comes from the task assigned to the subject.

Consequently, the formation of concepts is not built according to the type of associative chain, but according to the type of a purposeful process, consisting of a number of operations that play the role of means in relation to solving the main problem, that is, memorizing words and associating them with objects does not lead to the formation of a concept. It is necessary that the subject be confronted with a task that cannot be solved otherwise than through the formation of concepts in order for this process to arise.

Now this begs the question, At what age does concept formation begin? Conducted studies among children primary school, argue that the formation of concepts arises only with the onset of adolescence and turns out to be inaccessible to the child until this period is reached.

At the end of the 12th year of a child’s life, a sharp increase in the ability to independently form general objective ideas is detected. This is due to the fact that thinking in concepts, detached from visual aspects, places demands on the child that exceed his mental capabilities up to the age of 12.

But, according to some psychologists, a child already at the age of 3 has all the intellectual operations that make up the thinking of a teenager. However, contrary to this statement, special studies show that only after 12 years, that is, with the beginning of adolescence, the child begins to develop processes leading to the formation of concepts and abstract thinking.

Development of scientific concepts in childhood.

Part I .

The question of the development of scientific concepts at school age is the most important from the point of view of the goals and objectives facing the school in connection with educating the child in terms of scientific knowledge. The most surprising thing is the fact that this problem turns out to be almost undeveloped, although it is precisely this problem that contains the key to the entire history of the child’s mental development and, therefore, the study of children’s thinking should begin.

A series of studies were conducted among children aged 7 and 10 years, the purpose of which was a comparative study of the development of everyday and scientific concepts at primary school age. The main objectives of these studies were to experimentally test the path of development of scientific and everyday concepts, and solving various problems with the learning and development of children.

The study of the development of children's thinking in the process of schooling was based on a number of premises:

1. the meanings of words (concepts) develop.

2. Scientific concepts also develop in a certain way, and are not acquired in a ready-made form.

3. transferring conclusions obtained from everyday experience to scientific ones is not legitimate.

To carry out the research, a special experimental technique was carried out, the essence of which was that certain structurally homogeneous tasks were set before the children, and they were studied using scientific and everyday material. In order to identify levels of awareness of cause-and-effect relationships and sequence relationships using everyday and scientific material, an experimental technique of storytelling through a series of pictures was used, ending sentences after the words “ although", "because" and conversation.

Study #1

The children were offered a variety of pictures that reflected the sequence of events: the beginning, continuation, end of something. A series of pictures reflecting the material covered at school were compared with a series of everyday pictures. Example: “Kolya went there because...”, “Masha still doesn’t know how to write, although...”. Based on a series of everyday tests, a series of scientific tests was constructed that reflected the program material I And IV classes. In both cases, the child's task was to complete the sentences.

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky

Thinking and speech

Preface

This work is psychological research one of the most difficult, confusing and the most complex issues experimental psychology - the question of thinking and speech. Systematic experimental development of this problem, as far as we know, has not yet been undertaken by any of the researchers. The solution to the problem facing us, at least to an initial approximation, could be carried out only through a series of private experimental studies of individual aspects of the issue that interests us, such as the study of experimentally formed concepts, the study of written speech and its relationship to thinking, the study of inner speech, etc. .d.

In addition to experimental research, we inevitably had to turn to theoretical and critical research. On the one hand, we had to, through theoretical analysis and generalization of the large amount of factual material accumulated in psychology, through comparison and comparison of phylo- and ontogenesis data, outline the starting points for solving our problem and develop the initial prerequisites for independently obtaining scientific facts in the form of a general doctrine of genetic roots thinking and speech. On the other hand, it was necessary to subject to critical analysis the most ideologically powerful of modern theories thinking and speech in order to build on them, clarify the path of our own searches, draw up preliminary working hypotheses and, from the very beginning, contrast the theoretical path of our research with the path that led to the construction of the dominant modern science, but untenable and therefore in need of revision and overcoming theories.

During the study, we had to resort to theoretical analysis twice more. The study of thinking and speech inevitably affects a number of related and borderline areas of scientific knowledge. Comparison of data from the psychology of speech and linguistics, experimental study of concepts and psychological theory learning turned out to be inevitable. It seemed to us that it is most convenient to resolve all these questions that arise along the way in their purely theoretical formulation, without analyzing independently accumulated factual material. Following this rule, we introduced into the context of research into the development of scientific concepts a working hypothesis about learning and development that we developed elsewhere and on other material. And, finally, theoretical generalization, bringing together all experimental data turned out to be the last point of application of theoretical analysis to our research.

Thus, our research turned out to be complex and diverse in its composition and structure, but at the same time, each particular task facing individual segments of our work was so subordinated to the general goal, so connected with the previous and subsequent segments, that the whole work as a whole - we we dare to hope so - it is essentially a single, although divided into parts, study, which is entirely, in all its parts, aimed at solving the main and central task - the genetic analysis of the relationship between thought and word.

In accordance with this main task, the program of our research and this work was determined. We started by posing the problem and searching for research methods.

Then, in a critical study, we tried to analyze the two most complete and powerful theories of the development of speech and thinking - the theory of Piaget and V. Stern, in order from the very beginning to contrast our formulation of the problem and method of research with the traditional formulation of the question and traditional method and thereby outline what we should actually look for in the course of our work, to what final point it should lead us. Further, we had to precede our two experimental studies of the development of concepts and basic forms of verbal thinking with a theoretical study that would clarify the genetic roots of thinking and speech and thereby outline the starting points for our independent work on the study of the genesis of verbal thinking. The central part of the entire book is formed by two experimental studies, one of which is devoted to elucidating the main path of development of word meanings in childhood, and the other to a comparative study of the development of scientific and spontaneous concepts in a child. Finally, in the final chapter we tried to bring together the data from the entire study and present in a coherent and integral form the entire process of speech thinking, as it is drawn in the light of these data.

As with any research that seeks to bring something new to the solution of the problem being studied, the question naturally arises in relation to our work as to what it contains that is new and, therefore, controversial, which requires careful analysis and further verification. We can list in a few words the new things that our work brings to the general doctrine of thinking and speech. Without dwelling on the somewhat new formulation of the problem that we assumed, and in a certain sense, the new research method that we applied, what is new in our research can be reduced to the following points: 1) experimental establishment of the fact that the meanings of words develop in childhood , and identification of the main stages in their development; 2) revealing the unique path of development of a child’s scientific concepts in comparison with his spontaneous concepts and clarifying the basic laws of this development; 3) revealing the psychological nature of written speech as an independent function of speech and its relationship to thinking; 4) experimental revelation of the psychological nature of inner speech and its relationship to thinking. In this enumeration of the new data contained in our research, we had in mind, first of all, what this research can contribute to the general doctrine of thinking and speech in the sense of new, experimentally established psychological facts, and then those working hypotheses and those theoretical generalizations that inevitably had to arise in the process of interpretation, explanation and comprehension of these facts. It is neither the right nor the duty of the author, of course, to enter into an assessment of the meaning and truth of these facts and these theories. This is a matter for critics and readers of this book.

This book is the result of almost ten years of continuous work by the author and his collaborators on the study of thinking and speech. When this work began, we were not yet clear not only about its final results, but also about many questions that arose in the middle of the study. Therefore, in the course of our work, we repeatedly had to revise previously put forward provisions, discard and cut off many things as having turned out to be incorrect, rebuild and deepen others, and finally develop and write others completely new. The main line of our research has been steadily developing in one main direction, taken from the very beginning, and in this book we have tried to expand explicitly much of what was contained implicite in our previous works, but at the same time - and much of what we Previously it seemed correct to exclude it from this work as an outright fallacy.

A significant contribution to solving the problem of the relationship between thinking and speech was made by L.S. Vygotsky. He wrote: “The word 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 stuck on as a individual name on a separate object: it always characterizes the object or phenomenon designated by it in a generalized manner and, therefore, acts as an act of thinking. But the word is also a means of communication, so it is part of speech. It is in the meaning of the word that the knot of that unity that we call verbal thinking is tied.”

From the point of view of L.S. Vygotsky, initially thinking and speech performed different functions and developed relatively independently. In the phylogenesis and ontogenesis of thinking and speech, a pre-speech phase in the development of intelligence and a pre-intellectual phase in the development of speech are clearly distinguished. Small children and higher animals display unique means of communication that are not associated with thinking - expressive movements, gestures, facial expressions that reflect internal states a living being, but not a sign or a generalization - in turn, there are types of thinking that are not associated with speech.

L.S. Vygotsky believed that at the age of about two years a critical, turning point occurs: speech becomes intellectual, and thinking becomes verbal. Signs of a turning point in the development of both functions are a rapid and active expansion of the child’s vocabulary and a rapid increase in communicative vocabulary. The child discovers for the first time the symbolic function of speech, realizes the general meaning of the word as a means of communication and begins to use it both for communication and for solving problems. The child begins to call different objects with the same word - this is direct evidence that he is mastering concepts.

The concept allows us to generalize and deepen knowledge about an object, going beyond the limits of the directly perceived in its knowledge. The concept acts as an important element not only of thinking and speech, but also of perception, attention, and memory. 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.

Of the many qualities and properties contained in a word-concept, the child first assimilates only those that directly appear in the actions he performs with the corresponding objects. In the future, as they gain and enrich life experience, they learn more deep meaning concepts, including those qualities of the corresponding objects that are not directly perceived. The process of concept formation begins long before mastering speech, but becomes truly active only when the child has already sufficiently mastered speech as a means of communication and developed his practical intelligence.

The child's first word has the meaning of a whole phrase. What an adult would express in an extended sentence, a child conveys in one word. In the development of the semantic (notional) side of speech, the child begins with a whole sentence and only then moves on to the use of private semantic units, such as individual words. At the initial and final moments, the development of the semantic and physical (sound) aspects of speech proceeds in different, as if opposite, ways. The semantic side of speech is developed from the whole to the part, while its physical side develops from part to whole, from word to sentence.

To understand the relationship of thought to word important has inner speech. Unlike external speech, it has a special syntax. 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 form of inner speech is predicativity. Examples of predicativeness are found in dialogues well knowledgeable friend a friend of people who understand “without words” what we are talking about. For such people, for example, there is no need to always name the subject of conversation or to indicate the subject in every sentence or phrase they utter: in most cases it is well known to them.

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 is, as it were, enriched with a double meaning, taken separately from each word combined in it. So, in the limit, you can reach a word that absorbs the meaning of the whole statement. A word in inner speech is 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. Such speech, due to its mentioned features, can be considered as an internal plane of verbal thinking, “mediating the dynamic relationship between thought and word.” Inner speech is the process of thinking with pure meanings.