Speech and thinking A brief history of the problem

Not being able to go deep into the history of national science, we will focus on the most authoritative and significant theoretical constructs in the field of speech thinking research, in our opinion. Among the numerous predecessors of the modern theory of speech activity, it is necessary to single out the works of scientists whose names we already mentioned in the introductory chapter: L. S. Vygotsky and N. I. Zhinkina. Let us turn to a concise, concise, if necessary, presentation of the conceptual provisions of both scientists.

The most consistent views of L. S. Vygotsky on the problem of generating and understanding speech are expressed in his book Thinking and Speech. The main question that the scientist tried to answer was - what lies between thought and word?

In resolving the task, an important role was played by the distinction between two fundamental categories of understanding the concept of a scientist - meaning and meaning . Meaning is an objectively established system of relations in the course of the history of society, which stands behind the word. This is what unites various native speakers in the understanding of a particular nomination. Usually vocabulary interpretations of tokens tend to express their meanings. For example, the word chair in its meaning is a piece of furniture, which is a special device for sitting one person who has a back and does not have armrests. Meaning is the individual meaning of the word, which is associated with the personal subjective experience of the speaker and the specific situation of communication. The same token is a chair in the consciousness of

personal people have an unequal semantic content - from a Viennese chair from an expensive headset to an ordinary squeaky “invalid” standing in a state institution with a battered upholstery made of leatherette.

We emphasize once again the situational nature of all meaning. The word rope in a situation where you need to tie up the cake will have a different meaning than in a situation where it becomes necessary to hang oneself.

Meaning, therefore, is always individually personal. He is born in the consciousness of the speaker and is not always clear to others. The meaning corresponds with the thought, with the original intent of the statement. He seems to carry the primary constant, the content, which should be embodied in speech. The value represents the result of speech generation. This is what is clear to all participants of communication. The value is realized in the speech work.

According to Vygotsky, the movement from thought to word appears in the form of the transformation of personal meaning into a commonly understood meaning. However, this movement is preceded by an important stage: the thought itself does not come from a different thought, but from various human needs, from a sphere that covers all our inclinations, motivations, emotions, etc. In other words, the thought is a motive, that is for what we speak. Motive - the first instance in the generation of speech. It forms the communicative intention, the readiness of a person to perform speech actions. He becomes the final authority in the reverse process - the process of perception and understanding of a statement, because we understand not speech, and not even thought, but for the sake of what our interlocutor expresses this or that thought, i.e. speech motive.

The transformation of thought into a word is not suddenly realized, it is accomplished in inner speech. The category of "internal speech" is perhaps the most important in the concept of an outstanding psychologist. Inner speech is not “talking to yourself,” not “speech minus sound.” It has a special structure and is qualitatively different from external speech. To begin with, inner speech is speech consisting of predicates, keywords that carry the core of information. Since the thought (idea) already carries in itself what the conversation will take, a special designation just needs to be said about the subject of speech (we remember that such relevant information is called re-

my). So, internal speech is like a set of rem of the future statement.

In terms of its structure, internal speech resembles colloquial situational communication. Imagine a situation: at the bus stop, passengers await the arrival of a late bus. Suddenly one of the most restless and keen passengers gazes into the distance and says: “Go!”. This word alone is enough for those around them to understand the meaning of the statement. Take another situation. Students, sitting in the audience, are waiting for the teacher. One of them looks out into the corridor and says: “Go!”. Of course, it will be clear to everyone that a lecturer is coming, not a bus. Internal speech has similar functional properties. This speech is curtailed, compressed, often de-grammatic. It carries the summary of the future utterance and unfolds in a matter of a split second.

It is in the inner speech that words pass from intention to meaning. It is here that the first verbal designations of the elements of meaning appear, which subsequently unfold into a coherent, filled with universally understood meanings of grammatical speech.

Inner speech is the result of a long evolution of speech consciousness. She is not yet a preschooler. It develops from the external, so-called egocentric speech of small children, which is increasingly curtailed, done first in a whisper, and only then goes inside the linguistic consciousness. Such a transformation of external speaking into internal concise speech is called the internalization of speech. Usually, the internal speech mechanism normally completes its formation by adolescence (10-11 years old).

The doctrine of inner speech is one of the most important merits of L. S. Vygotsky and his numerous students and followers. It clarifies many secrets of the formation and perception of statements in the process of communication.

One of the basic tenets of Vygotsky’s concept is the following statement: “Thought is not embodied, but accomplished in a word.” This quotation from the book of the scientist began to wander in different textbooks and monographs on the problems of the psychology of speech. Taken out of context, it is often interpreted as follows: a person does not know what he will say until he speaks. In this regard, I recall

a conversation with a little girl described by the children's writer B. Zakhoder. In response to the question “What are you thinking about?” The girl said:

- How do I know what I think? I'll tell you, then find out!

Common sense raises doubts about the fairness of such an interpretation of the expression of a statement. And really, don't we know before the launch of the mechanism of speech activity of what is being discussed? Another thing is that in the process of speaking the transformation of the concept takes place.

“A thought spoken is a lie,” said the poet. And indeed, we often experience acute dissatisfaction with the verbal expression of our plans. And on the contrary, how often we are convinced that there is no content behind the beautiful, fully connected statements. Yes, in the process of the appearance of statements, there is a “struggle” of an individual-personal sense, understandable only to the speaker himself, and linguistic forms, bearing in themselves the meanings adopted by the collective. Such reasoning forced the student and ally of L. S. Vygotsky, S. L. Rubinshtein, to somewhat soften the definition of a teacher: "In speech, we formulate a thought, but in formulating, we form and form it next to everything." This version is closer to the truth, but it does not give an answer to the questions that arise:

1. If inner speech is formed in children by the age of 10, how do preschoolers understand the statement?

2. How is the process of translating from one language to another?

In the book of L. S. Vygotsky, there is an allusion to the resolution of the emerging contradiction. “The units of thought and units of speech do not coincide,” the scientist wrote. He compared the process of generating a statement with a hanging cloud that is shed by a rain of words. In other words, the researcher identified the existence of two qualitatively different languages ​​that interact in the human mind: the language of thought and the language of verbal. The early demise of the scientist did not make it possible to develop the planned positions. The contradictions of L. S. Vygotsky's concept were resolved by another outstanding domestic psychologist N. I. Zhinkin, who proposed the hypothesis of the existence of a universal subject code (CPC) in human consciousness.

According to Zhinkin's concept, the basic component of thinking is a special language of intelligence (this is what the researcher called him the universal subject code). This code has a fundamentally non-verbal nature and is a system of signs that have the character of a sensual reflection of reality in consciousness. It is the language of schemes, images, tactile and olfactory imprints of reality, kinetic (motor) impulses, etc.

CPC - the language in which the formation of the concept of speech, the primary recording of personal meaning. And the movement from thought to word begins with the work of this non-verbal communication education. The dynamics of the generation of statements in the internal speech, according to Zhinkin, must be represented in the form of recoding the content of the future speech work from the code of images and patterns into the verbal language. CPC is an international language. It is the property of people of different linguistic cultures and, by virtue of this, it is a prerequisite for understanding foreign language.

Zhinkin presented the birth of a statement as a dramatic process in which thought as if struggling with the word. “A thought,” wrote the scientist, “in its substantial composition, always makes its way into the language, rebuilds it and encourages development. This continues uninterruptedly, since the content of thought is more than the pattern-based possibilities of the language. That is why the birth of thought is carried out in the subject-pictorial code: the representation, as well as the thing it represents, can be the subject of an infinite number of statements. This makes it difficult to speak, but leads to the statement ".

Theoretical searches of N. I. Zhinkin do not refute, but considerably complement and deepen the concept of L. S. Vygotsky. They allow you to clarify the classical formula for the transition of thought to speech. A thought, existing within the limits of the possibilities of a universal subject code, during its verbalization is capable of transforming itself, accumulating meanings that carry units of a specific national language. The fundamental principles of L. S. Vygotsky, N. Y. Zhinkin and their students and followers formed the basis of the theory of speech activity. One of the first generalized, systematized and presented in his writings a holistic concept of the formation and understanding of the speech message A. A. Leontiev.

Let us consider in more detail modern scientific ideas about the processes of generation and semantic perception of a statement.