The Correlation of Languages and Thought - Essay Example

LANGUAGES AND THOUGHT What if someone asks for an explanation about the terms thought, Language and speech and their differences? It would not be very easy to answer this question, despite the fact that these terms are extremely common to us and we practice these concepts inevitably throughout our lives. It happens sometimes that the existence and the conceptual understanding of some such extremely common things are barely pondered upon or looked up to. Thus the mere thought of explaining them is simply out of question. The following text is however an attempt to put it in words. To settle an inquisitive novice these terms can be described very plainly. Thought can simply be defined as a mental state of a person at any instant of time. Generally, what best describes languages is a combination of vocabulary and grammar (a set of rules that defines how language can be used properly and meaningfully). This combination does not include phrases and idioms. According to a web dictionary a language can be defined as, “Any means of conveying or communicating ideas; specifically, human speech; the expression of ideas by the voice; sounds, expressive of thought, articulated by the organs of the throat and mouth.” Hence the narration of thoughts with the help of a language should be “Speech”. The superficial correlation of language, thought and speech, as mentioned in the text above, lays the ground for a stream of philosophical questions. Like, is there any relationship of interdependency between language and speech? Does a speech always depict the respective thought process or do people use it to conceal their thoughts as well? How does the process of thinking take place in people’s mind and at what stage does it initiate? How does a child learn to make use of languages to narrate thoughts? What is ego-centric or internal thinking? What role do instincts play in an infant’s thought process and narration of thoughts? In order to pursue answers to the above questions the studies of renowned psychologists and philosophers are looked up. Among them Vygotsky’s study is of executive importance. Language is not dependent on anything else but itself. There are various theories to elaborate this. Russian psychologist Vygotsky in his book “Thought and Language”, emphasizes upon the social nature of a language stating that the environment surrounding a person essentially influences his thoughts. Young children are influenced greatly by their environment and by the input they get from the elders surrounding them. These influences lay the basic principles of thought and learning within children. Vygotsky emphasizes that the skills, values and knowledge imparted to children by their elders are done with the help of languages and social interactions. The words that come out of an elder’s mouth are objects and thoughts of a youngster. Since Vygotsky believes that languages and thoughts are interdependent internally the rational development of a child is dependent upon his language development. Interactions with the environment formulate and polish the inner speech of a child. The inner speech which is the core of all his personality’s thought stream. The development of a toddler can be a perfect example that depicts Vygotsky’s theory. Partial utterance of merely a single word means one whole sentence. The mere sounds of an infant’s goo gaa and pointing and different objects are his initial aptitudes towards expression of his thoughts. Just saying ‘drink’ could mean that he wants to drink something or could even be saying what another person is drinking. The next step after utterance of a word from is mouth is that he looks at the expressions of the people surrounding him. Their reactions are registered into his stream of thoughts giving him the idea of the nature of his spoken word. He registers and learns when to say the specific word and when not to say it thus, the next time the child utters the very same word with influence of his past experience. At a later stage in the development of thought and speech children’s verbalization becomes immaterial and thoughts can be manipulated on their own in the mind. For example, a simple addition problem can be solved in the mind only and does not require to be said out loud in order to be solved. Vygotsky emphasizes that inner speech and outer speech are separate entities with respect to their qualitative nature. Connected back to self talk, Vygotsky states that initial self talk by a child leads to the development of his inner speech. This inner speech cannot be put into words and said out by mature language speaker i.e. elders. Children however possess the ability to transmit their inner thoughts. This can also be explained by comparing this quality of theirs with their innocence. Any gesture a young child is straight from his inner thoughts and depicts exactly what is inside him. There are no second thoughts to it. These inner thought gestures by a child are spontaneous often amusing their elders. With elders however, this is not the case. The verbal speech of an elder does not necessarily relate to his inner stream of thoughts. This gradual shift of the inner speech to the outer speech proceeds as an individual grows. It reaches to a stage where no one except the thinker himself can be exposed to his inner thoughts. No spoken language can be used to express the compressed these thoughts. These inner thoughts develop socially. Thus,the more a person interacts with individuals the more his inner self evolves and the more his inner thought stream solidifies. This process through which inner speech develops as an extension of external/social speech has been referred to as internalization by Vygotsky. Overall it may well be ascertained that the phenomenon of internalization has resulted in the expansion of speech over two domains. Firstly, the domain of ‘outer or social communication’ and secondly, the domain of ‘inner thinking’ and ‘inner speech’. It is not attempted to state that thinking cannot take place without language rather the depth of inner thoughts is discussed here. A single word in inner speech is worth a lot of meaning to its thinker. The same thought, if penned down in words, would take many a words altogether in external speech and would still sometimes not be able to deliver its full meaning. Both these forms of speech can thus be termed as antonyms of each other. “A direct transition from thought to word is impossible” says Vergotsky. He emphasizes that a thought has to lead through meanings to achieve the form of words. There are no EXACT words for some specific thoughts. Thus the words in which a thought is transferred may have more than one meaning to them if looked in the opposite direction. Like, if a list of words is tried to be wound back into a thought the possible set of thoughts contains more than one entity. The study of language and thought has more than just one domain. John Lucy assesses the relativity hypothesis of language. Meaning to say that the differences among languages influence habitual thought. In his book “Language Diversity and Thoughts”, (1992) John Lucy presented a critical analysis of the hypothesis of language relativity and commented on the methodology along with scrutinizing the previous work done in this regard. Some of the answers for the queries raised at the initiation of this article can be found in John Lucy’s writings. He highlighted the limits of the thinking paradigms of Psycholinguists and anthropological linguists. They respectively state that: “language does not influence thought” and that “language influences thought strongly”. John Lucy disproves and contests both the results by indicating the former as based on just one language i.e. English only and for later he argues that the thought is operationali zed using vocabulary (a linguistic object). American anthropological linguists Boas, Sapir and Whorf are studied by John Lucy for the reformulation of the problem. Sapir’s work conclude that grammatical categories influence habitual thoughts of speaker and Whorf extended this thought and concluded that a certain world view can be supported by and all-encompassing grammatical propensity. Along with a reasonable assertion of Whorf’s and Sapir’s ideas, John Lucy insists for an experimentally testable hypothesis of his reformulation. He insists on independent measure of thought as in the words below, (J Lucy. 1992) Of course, categories of language may not be readily distinguishable from categories of thought in ordinary behavior. Nonetheless, it is important that there be a clear analytic distinction between linguistic categories and cognitive categories so that the influence of the former on the latter (if any) can be detected and identified. (p. 264) Commenting on the relationship of language and thought Lucy claims that the influence of language on thought must first be demonstrated using extended independent measures of thoughts. In his book Grammatical Categories and Cognition (1992), he successfully provides empirical support to this reformulation of linguistic relativity hypothesis. He also highlighted the objects that stay stable across languages like color and provide a strong ground for comparison. Moreover he emphasized on the idea of neutral meta-language formulation by filtering out the universal linguistic nomenclature. This in his view can successfully be used for and empirical testing of his refined formulation of linguistic relativity hypothesis. He commented that the previous work lacks this idea thus the conclusion can be deemed incomplete. Conclusively, it can be said that in order to understand one’s speech it is necessary that the thought behind it should be assessed along with the motivating factor behind the thought. Thus, speech that uses language is incomplete without accompanying thought. Despite various psychological studies there is still much room for research that would explain the interdependence of language and thought. REFERENCES: Brainy quote. [Online] [Accessed 23 May 2011]. Lucy,J. 1992. Language Diversity and Thought. New York Cambridge University Press. Lucy,J. 1992. Grammatical Categories and Cognition. New York Cambridge University Press. Vergotsky L. S. Thought and Language. The M I T Press. Read More