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Speech develops following the development of thinking. Thinking and speech consultation on speech development (preparatory group) on the topic

Ratio

thinking and speech

Introduction

“The native word is the basis of every

Mental development and treasures -

The bottom of all knowledge."

K.D. Ushinsky

Language is the most amazing and perfect creation of folk culture.

Being, on the one hand, a tool for expressing our ideas, thoughts, knowledge, and on the other hand, a means for their enrichment and expansion, for the formation of our consciousness, the word serves the purposes of all life, both ordinary and everyday, as well as the highest.

To master, as perfectly as possible, all types and manifestations of speech means to master the most powerful instrument of human mental development, and therefore, the culture of mankind. The relationship between language and thinking requires special attention. Language is the immediate reality of thought.

Thinking, types of thinking

"U common sense an excellent sense of smell, but old, dull teeth,” this is how one of the interesting researchers, K. Duncker, described the importance of thinking, obviously contrasting it with common sense. It is difficult to disagree with this, bearing in mind that thinking in its highest creative human forms is not reducible to either intuition or life experience, which form the basis of the so-called “common sense”. What is it thinking?

First of all, thinking is the highest cognitive process. It represents the generation of new knowledge. an active form of creative reflection and transformation of reality by a person. Thinking gives rise to a result that is neither in reality itself nor in the subject in reality. this moment time does not exist. Thinking (in elementary forms it is also present in animals) can also be understood as the acquisition of new knowledge, the creative transformation of existing ideas.

The difference between thinking and others psychological processes is that it is almost always associated with the presence problematic situation, the problem that needs to be solved, and the active change of the conditions in which this task is given.

In practice, thinking as a separate mental process does not exist; it is invisibly present in all other cognitive processes: perception, attention, imagination, memory, speech. The highest forms of these processes are necessarily associated with thinking, and the degree of its participation in these cognitive processes determines the level of their development.

Thinking is the movement of ideas that reveals the essence of things. Its result is not an image, but a certain thought, an idea. A specific result of thinking can be a concept - a generalized reflection of a class of objects in their most general and essential features.

Thinking is a special kind of theoretical and practical activity that involves a system of actions and operations included in it of an indicative - research, transformative and cognitive nature.

Theoretical conceptual thinking- this is thinking, using which a person, in the process of solving a problem, turns to concepts, performs actions in the mind, without directly dealing with the experience gained through the senses. He discusses and searches for a solution to a problem from beginning to end in his mind, using ready-made knowledge acquired by other people. It is typical for scientific theoretical research.

Theoretical figurative thinking differs from conceptual thinking in that the material that a person uses here to solve a problem is not concepts, judgments and inferences, but images. They are directly retrieved from memory or creatively recreated by the imagination. Workers of literature, art, and people of creative work in general use this kind of thinking.

Both types of theoretical thinking complement each other quite well and reveal to a person different but interconnected aspects of existence.

A distinctive feature of the next type of thinking - visual-figurative - is that the thought process in it is directly related to the thinking person’s perception of the surrounding reality and cannot be accomplished without it. Thoughts are visual and figurative, a person is tied to reality, and the images themselves necessary for thinking are presented in his short-term and operative memory. This form of thinking is most fully and comprehensively represented among children of preschool and primary school age, and among adults – among people employed practical work. This type of thinking is quite developed in all people who often have to make decisions about the objects of their activity only by observing them, but without directly touching them.

The last of the types of thinking indicated in the diagram is visual-effective. Its peculiarity lies in the fact that the thinking process itself is a practical transformative activity carried out by a person with real objects. The main condition for solving the problem in this case is the correct actions with the appropriate objects. This type of thinking is widely represented among people engaged in real production work, the result of which is the creation of any specific material product.

All of the listed types of thinking coexist in humans and can be represented in the same activity. However, depending on its nature and ultimate goals, one or another type of thinking dominates. For this reason they all differ. In terms of their degree of complexity, in terms of the demands they place on a person’s intellectual and other characteristics, all of these types of thinking are not inferior to each other.

Speech and its functions

Speech is the main means of human communication. Without it, a person would not have the opportunity to receive and transmit a large number of information, in particular such that carries a large semantic load or captures something in itself. what cannot be perceived with the help of the senses (abstract concepts, not directly perceived phenomena, laws, rules, etc.). Without writing a person would be deprived of the opportunity to find out how people of previous generations lived, thought and did. He would have no way to convey his thoughts and feelings. Thanks to speech as a means of communication, a person’s individual consciousness, not limited to personal experience, is enriched by the experience of other people, and to a much greater extent than observation and other processes of non-speech direct cognition carried out through the senses: perception, attention, imagination, memory can allow. and thinking. Through speech, the psychology and experience of one person becomes accessible to other people, enriches them, and contributes to their development.

In terms of its vital significance, speech is multifunctional. It is not only a means of communication, but also a means of thinking, a carrier of consciousness, memory, information (written texts), a means of controlling people’s behavior and regulating a person’s own behavior. According to its many functions, speech is a polymorphic activity, that is, it is represented in various forms: external, internal, monologue, dialogue, written, oral, etc. Although all these forms of speech are interconnected, their purpose in life is not the same. External speech, for example, plays mainly the role of a means of communication, internal speech - a means of thinking. Written speech most often acts as a way to remember information. Monologue serves the process of one-way, and dialogue serves the process of two-way exchange of information.

It is important to distinguish language from speech. Their main difference is as follows. Language is a system of conventional symbols with the help of which combinations of sounds are transmitted that have a certain meaning and meaning for people. Speech is a set of spoken and perceived sounds that have the same meaning and the same meaning as the corresponding system of written signs. Language is the same for all people who use it; speech is individually unique. Speech expresses the psychology of an individual person or a community of people for whom these speech features are characteristic; language reflects the psychology of the people for whom it is native. Speech without language acquisition is impossible, while language can exist and develop relatively independently of a person, according to laws not related to either his psychology or his behavior.

The connecting link between language and speech is the meaning of the word. It is expressed both in units of language and in units of speech. The meanings of the same words for different people are different, although the linguistic meanings may be the same. The meaning of words is directly related to the idea of them as concepts. There are infinitely many different objects and phenomena in the world around us, and if we tried to call each of them a separate word, then the vocabulary that we had to use would become practically immense, and the language itself would be inaccessible to humans. We simply would not be able to use it as a means of communication. Fortunately, the situation is such that we do not need to come up with our own specific name, an independent word, for each separately existing object or phenomenon. In our communication and thinking, we get by quite satisfactorily with a very limited number of them, and our vocabulary is much smaller than the number denoted by words of objects and phenomena. Each such word is a concept that refers not to one object or phenomenon, but to a whole class, distinguished by a set of common characteristics. Possessing a concept, we know a lot about an object or phenomenon.

Main function of speech a person still has the fact that she isthinking tool. A word as a concept contains much more information than a simple combination of sounds can carry.

Relationship between thinking and speech

During the whole history psychological research thinking and speech, the problem of communication between them attracted increased attention. Its proposed solutions were very different - from the complete separation of speech and thinking and considering them as completely independent functions from each other to their equally unambiguous and unconditional combination, up to absolute identification.

Many modern scientists adhere to a compromise point of view, believing that thinking and speech are inextricably linked; they represent relatively independent realities in their functioning. The main question that is now being discussed in connection with this problem is the question of the nature of the real connection between thinking and speech, their genetic roots and the transformations that they undergo in the process of their separate and joint development.

L.S. made a significant contribution to solving this problem. Vygotsky. The word, he wrote, relates to speech as well as to thinking. It is a living cell that contains, in its simplest form, the basic properties inherent in verbal thinking as a whole. A word is not a label pasted as an individual name on a separate object. It always characterizes the object or phenomenon designated by it in a general way and, therefore, acts as an act of thinking.

But the word is also a means of communication, so it is part of speech. Being devoid of meaning, the word no longer refers to either thought or speech; having acquired its meaning, it immediately becomes organic part both. It is precisely in the meaning of the word, says L.S. Vygotsky, the knot of that unity, which is called verbal thinking, is tied. However, thinking and speech have different genetic roots. Initially they performed different functions and developed separately. The original function of speech was the communicative function. Speech itself, as a means of communication, arose due to the need to separate and coordinate the actions of people in the process of joint work. At the same time, in verbal communication, the content conveyed by speech belongs to a certain class of phenomena and, therefore, already presupposes their generalized reflection, i.e. fact of thinking. At the same time, such a method of communication as a pointing gesture, for example, does not carry any generalization and therefore does not relate to thought.

In turn, there are types of thinking that are not associated with speech, for example, visual-effective, or practical, thinking in animals. In small children and in higher animals, unique means of communication are found that are not associated with thinking. These are expressive movements, gestures, facial expressions that reflect the internal states of a living being, but are not a sign or a generalization. In the phylogenesis of thinking and speech, a pre-speech phase in the development of intelligence and a pre-intellectual phase in the development of speech clearly emerges.

L.S. Vygotsky believed that at the age of approximately 2 years, i.e. In what J. Piaget designated as the beginning of the stage of pre-operational thinking following sensorimotor intelligence, a critical turning point occurs in the relationship between thinking and speech: speech begins to become intellectualized, and thinking becomes verbal.

Signs of the onset of this turning point in the development of both functions are the child’s rapid and active expansion of his vocabulary(he begins to often ask adults the question: what is this called?) and an equally rapid, spasmodic increase in communicative vocabulary. The child, as it were, discovers for the first time the symbolic function of speech and discovers an understanding that behind the word as a means of communication there actually lies a generalization, and uses it both for communication and for solving problems. He begins to call different objects with the same word, and this is direct evidence that the child is mastering concepts. When solving any intellectual problems, he begins to reason out loud, and this, in turn, is a sign that he uses speech as a means of thinking, and not just communication. The meaning of the word as such becomes practically accessible to the child.

But these facts are signs of only the beginning of the real assimilation of concepts and their use in the process of thinking and speech. Further, this process, deepening, continues for quite a long time, up to adolescence. Real assimilation scientific concepts as a child occurs relatively late, approximately at the time to which J. Piaget attributed the stage of formal operations, i.e. to average age from 11-12 to 14-15 years. Consequently, the entire period of development of conceptual thinking takes about 10 years in a person’s life. All these years of intense mental work and training sessions spend on the child’s assimilation of the most important category for the development of both intelligence and all other mental functions and personality as a whole - concepts.

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

Grammar is somewhat ahead of logic in the development of a child’s speech. He masters the conjunctions “because”, “despite”, “since”, “although” in speech earlier than the semantic statements corresponding to them. This means, wrote L.S. Vygotsky that the movement of semantics and the sound of a word in mastering complex syntactic structures do not coincide in development.

This discrepancy appears even more clearly in the functioning of developed thought: the grammatical and logical content of a sentence are not always identical. Even at the highest level of development of thinking and speech, when a child masters concepts, only a partial fusion occurs.

Inner speech is very important for understanding the relationship of thought to word. Unlike external speech, it has a special syntax and is characterized by fragmentation, fragmentation, and abbreviation. The transformation of external speech into internal speech occurs according to a certain law: in it, first of all, the subject is reduced and the predicate remains with the parts of the sentence related to it.

The main syntactic characteristic of inner speech is predicativity. Its examples are found in the dialogues of people who know each other well, who understand “without words” what is being said in the “conversation.” Such people, for example, do not sometimes have any need to exchange words at all, to name the subject of the conversation, to indicate the subject in each spoken sentence or phrase: in most cases it is already well known to them. Man thinking in internal dialogue, which is probably carried out through inner speech, as if communicating with oneself. Naturally, he doesn’t even need to identify the subject of the conversation for himself.

The basic law of development of the meanings of words used by a child in communication is their enrichment with vital and individual meaning. Functioning and developing in practical thinking and speech, the word seems to absorb new meanings. As a result of this operation, the meaning of the word used is enriched with a variety of cognitive, emotional and other associations. In inner speech - and this is its main distinguishing feature - the predominance of meaning over meaning is brought to its highest point. We can say that internal speech, unlike external speech, has a compressed predicative form and an expanded, deep semantic content.

Another feature of the semantics of inner speech is agglutination, i.e. a kind of merging of words into one with a significant abbreviation. The resulting word seems to be enriched with a double or even triple meaning, taken separately from each of the two or three words combined in it. So, in the limit, you can reach a word that absorbs the meaning of the whole statement, and it becomes, as L.S. said. Vygotsky, “a concentrated clot of meaning.” To completely translate this meaning into the plane of external speech, it was probably 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 oral and written speech. Due to the mentioned features, such speech can be considered as interior plan speech thinking. Inner speech is the process of thinking with “pure meanings”.

A.N. Sokolov showed that in the process of thinking, inner speech is an active articulatory, unconscious process, the unimpeded flow of which is very important for the implementation of those psychological functions in which it is very important for the implementation of those psychological functions in which inner speech takes part. As a result of his experiments with adults, where, in the process of perceiving a text or solving an arithmetic problem, they were asked to read out loud well-learned poems or pronounce the same simple syllables (for example, “ba-ba” or “la-la”), it was established that that both the perception of texts and the solution of mental problems are seriously hampered in the absence of inner speech. When perceiving texts in this case, only individual words were remembered, and their meaning was not captured. This means that thinking is present during reading and necessarily presupposes the internal, hidden from consciousness, work of the articulatory apparatus, which translates perceived meanings into meanings, of which inner speech actually consists.

Even more revealing than with adult subjects were similar experiments conducted with younger schoolchildren. In them, even a simple mechanical delay in articulation during mental work (clamping the tongue between the teeth) caused serious difficulties in reading and understanding the text and led to gross errors in writing.

Written text is the most extensive speech utterance, which involves a very long and complex path of mental work to translate meaning into meaning. In practice, this translation, as shown by A.N. Sokolov, is also carried out using an active process hidden from conscious control associated with the work of the articulatory apparatus.

Egocentric speech occupies an intermediate position between internal and external speech. This is speech directed not at a communication partner, but at oneself, not calculated and not implying a back reaction from another person present at the moment and located next to the speaker. This speech is especially noticeable in middle-aged children. preschool age when they play and seem to talk to themselves during the game.

Elements of this speech can also be found in an adult who, while solving a complex intellectual problem, thinking out loud, utters some phrases in the process of work that are understandable only to himself, apparently addressed to another, but not implying a mandatory response on his part. Egocentric speech is speech-reflection, serving not so much communication as thinking itself. It acts as external in form and internal in its psychological function. Having its original roots in the external dialogical speech, it eventually develops into internal. When difficulties arise in a person’s activities, the activity of his egocentric speech increases.

With the transition of external speech to internal egocentric speech gradually disappears. The decrease in its external manifestations should be looked at, as L.S. believed. Vygotsky, as to the increasing abstraction of thought from the sound side of speech, which is characteristic of internal speech. He was objected to by J. Piaget, who believed that egocentric speech is a rudimentary, relict form of speech,

Growing from internal to external. In such speech itself, he saw a manifestation of the child’s unsocialized, autistic thoughts. The gradual disappearance of egocentric speech was for him a sign that the child’s thought had acquired those qualities that it possesses. logical thinking adult. Many years later, having become acquainted with the counterarguments of L.S. Vygotsky, J. Piaget recognized the correctness of his position.

So far we have talked about the development of verbal thinking, i.e. that form of intellectualized speech that sooner or later ultimately turns into thought. We are convinced that thinking in its development has its own sources, independent of speech, and follows its own laws for a long period of time, until thought flows into speech, and the latter becomes intellectualized, i.e. understandable. We also know that even at the most high levels In their development, speech and thinking do not completely coincide. This means that speech must also have its own roots and laws of development. Let's look at some of them.

Process research experience speech development in children belonging to different peoples, countries, cultures and nations, shows that, despite the fact that differences in structure and content modern languages are striking; in general, the process of a child’s assimilation of his native speech follows general laws everywhere. For example, children of all countries and peoples with amazing ease acquire language and master speech in childhood, and this process begins and ends for them at approximately the same time, going through the same stages. By the age of about one year, all children begin to pronounce individual words. At about two years old, the child already speaks in two to three word sentences. By about four years of age, all children are able to speak quite freely.

One-year-old children usually already have quite a rich experience of interacting with the surrounding reality. They have clear ideas about their parents, about the environment, about food, about the toys with which they play. Long before children practically begin to use speech, their figurative world already has ideas that correspond to the words they are learning. In such conditions, prepared by previous experience of socialization, for mastering speech there is not much left for the child to do: mentally connect his existing ideas and images of reality with combinations of sounds corresponding to individual words. By the age of one, these combinations themselves are also quite well known to the child: after all, he has heard them many times from an adult.

The next stage of speech development occurs at approximately 1.5-2.5 years of age. At this stage, children learn to combine words, combine them into small phrases (two or three words), and they progress quite quickly from using such phrases to composing entire sentences.

After two or three word phrases, the child moves on to using other parts of speech and constructing sentences in accordance with the rules of grammar. At the previous and current stages of speech development, there are three ways to master language and further improve speech on this basis: imitation of adults; the formation of conditioned reflex connections, associative in nature, between images of objects, actions, perceived phenomena and corresponding words or phrases; formulation and testing of hypotheses about the connections between words and images empirically. To this it is necessary to add a kind of childish speech ingenuity, manifested in the fact that the child suddenly, completely independently, on his own initiative, begins to invent new words, pronounce phrases that he has never heard from an adult.

“In early childhood,” Pestalozzi wrote, “one should not reason with children at all, but should limit oneself to the following means for their mental development:

expand the circle of their observations as much as possible;
firmly and systematically strengthen in them the ideas obtained through observation;
to give them the extensive acquaintance with language necessary to express in words what nature and art have introduced them to through observation.”

LITERATURE

Isenina E.I. Preverbal period of children's speech development. – Saratov, 1986.
Luria A.R. Language and thinking. M., 1979.
Nemov R.S. Psychology. M., VLADOS 2002.
Tikheyeva E.I. Children's speech development. M., 1981
Ushakova T.N. et al. Human speech in communication. M., 1989

Main stages of development of meanings, functional equivalents of concepts: syncrets, complexes, pseudo-concepts, potential concept

SPEECH AS A TOOL OF THINKING

The main function of speech in humans is still that it is an instrument of thinking. A word as a concept contains much more information than a simple combination of sounds can carry.

The fact that human thinking is inextricably linked with speech is primarily proven by psychophysiological studies of the participation of the vocal apparatus in solving mental problems. An electromyographic study of the functioning of the vocal apparatus in connection with mental activity showed that in the most difficult and intense moments of thinking, a person experiences increased activity of the vocal cords. This activity appears in two forms: phasic and tonic. The first is recorded in the form of high-amplitude and irregular flashes speech motor potentials, and the second - in the form of a gradual increase in the amplitude of the electromyogram. It has been experimentally proven that the phasic form of speech motor potentials is associated with the hidden pronunciation of words to oneself, while the tonic form is associated with a general increase in speech motor activity,

It turned out that all types of human thinking associated with the need to use more or less detailed reasoning are accompanied by an increase in speech motor impulses, and habitual and repeated mental actions are accompanied by its reduction. There appears to be a certain optimal level of variation in the intensity of human speech-motor reactions, at which mental operations are performed most successfully, as quickly and accurately as possible.

Relationship between thinking and speech

Throughout the history of psychological research into thinking and speech, the problem of the connection between them has attracted increased attention. Its proposed solutions were very different - from the complete separation of speech and thinking and considering them as completely independent functions from each other to their equally unambiguous and unconditional combination, up to absolute identification.

Many modern scientists adhere to a compromise point of view, believing that although thinking and speech are inextricably linked, they represent relatively independent realities both in genesis and functioning. The main question that is now being discussed in connection with this problem is the question of the nature of the real connection between thinking and speech, about their genetic roots and the transformations that they undergo in the process of their separate and joint development.

L. S. Vygotsky made a significant contribution to solving this problem. The word, he wrote, relates to speech as well as to thinking. It is a living cell that contains, in its simplest form, the basic properties inherent in verbal thinking as a whole. A word is not a label pasted as an individual name on a separate object. It always characterizes the object or phenomenon it denotes in a general way and, therefore, acts as an act of thinking.

But the word is also a means of communication, so it is part of speech. Being devoid of meaning, the word no longer refers to either thought or speech; Having acquired its meaning, it immediately becomes an organic part of both. It is in the meaning of the word, says L. S. Vygotsky, that the knot of that unity, which is called verbal thinking, is tied.

However, thinking and speech have different genetic roots. Initially they performed different functions and developed separately. The original function of speech was the communicative function. Speech itself as a means of communication arose due to the need to separate and coordinate the actions of people in the process of joint work. At the same time, in verbal communication, the content conveyed by speech belongs to a certain class of phenomena and, therefore, already presupposes their generalized reflection, i.e., the fact of thinking. At the same time, such a method of communication as a pointing gesture, for example, does not carry any generalization and therefore does not relate to thought.

L. S. Vygotsky believed that at the age of approximately 2 years, i.e., at the age that J. Piaget designated as the beginning of the stage of pre-operational thinking that follows sensorimotor intelligence, a critical turning point occurs in the relationship between thinking and speech: speech begins become intellectualized, and thinking becomes verbal.

Signs of the onset of this turning point in the development of both functions are the child’s rapid and active expansion of his vocabulary (he often begins to ask adults the question: what is this called?) and an equally rapid, spasmodic increase in his communicative vocabulary. The child, as it were, discovers for the first time the symbolic function of speech and discovers an understanding that behind the word as a means of communication there actually lies a generalization, and uses it both for communication and for solving problems. He begins to call different objects with the same word, and this is direct evidence that the child is mastering concepts. When solving any intellectual problems, he begins to reason out loud, and this, in turn, is a sign that he is using speech as a means of thinking, and not just communication. The meaning of the word as such becomes practically accessible to the child.

But these facts are signs of only the beginning of the real assimilation of concepts and their use in the process of thinking and in speech. Further, this process, deepening, continues for quite a long time, right up to adolescence. The real assimilation of scientific concepts by a child is relative. but late, approximately by the time to which J. Piaget attributed the j stage of formal operations, i.e., to the average age from II-12 to] 14-15 years. Consequently, the entire period of development of conceptual thinking takes about 10 years in a person’s life. All these years of intensive mental work and educational activities are spent on the child’s assimilation of the most important category for the development of both intelligence and all other mental functions and personality as a whole - concepts.

Grammar is somewhat ahead of logic in the development of a child’s speech. He masters the conjunctions “because”, “despite”, “since”, “although” in speech earlier than the semantic statements corresponding to them. This means, wrote L. S. Vygotsky, that the movement of semantics and the sound of a word in mastering complex syntactic structures do not coincide in development.

The main syntactic characteristic of inner speech is predicativity. Its examples are found in the dialogues of people who know each other well, who understand “without words” what is being discussed in their “conversation.” Such people, for example, do not sometimes have any need to exchange words at all, to name the subject of the conversation, to indicate the subject in every sentence or phrase they utter: in most cases it is already well known to them. A person, thinking in an internal dialogue, which is probably carried out through inner speech, seems to communicate with himself. Naturally, he doesn’t even need to identify the subject of the conversation for himself.

The basic law of development of the meanings of words used by a child in communication is their enrichment with vital individual meaning. Functioning and developing in practical thinking and speech, the word seems to absorb new meanings. As a result of this operation, the meaning of the word used is enriched with a variety of cognitive, emotional and other associations. In inner speech - and this is its main distinguishing feature - the predominance of meaning over meaning is brought to its highest point. We can say that internal speech, unlike external speech, has a compressed predicative form and an expanded, deep semantic content.

Another feature of the semantics of inner speech is agglutination, i.e. a peculiar merging of words into one with their significant reduction. The resulting word seems to be enriched with a double or even triple meaning, taken separately from each of the two or three words combined in it. So, in the limit, you can reach a word that absorbs the meaning of a whole statement, and it becomes, as L. S. Vygotsky said, “a concentrated clot of meaning.” To completely translate this meaning into the plane of external speech, it would probably be necessary to use more than one sentence. Inner speech, apparently, consists of words of this kind, completely different in structure and use from the words that we use in our writing and writing. oral speech. Due to the above-mentioned features, such speech can be considered as an internal plane of speech thinking. Inner speech is the process of thinking with “pure meanings”.

A. N. Sokolov showed that in the process of thinking, inner speech is an active articulatory, unconscious process, the unimpeded flow of which is very important for the implementation of those psychological functions in which inner speech takes part." As a result of his experiments with adults, where in the process perception of a text or solving an arithmetic problem, they were asked to simultaneously read out loud well-learned poems or pronounce the same simple syllables (for example, “ba-ba” or “la-la”), it was found that both the perception of texts and the solution of mental tasks are seriously hampered in the absence of internal speech. When perceiving texts in this case, only individual words were remembered, and their meaning was not captured. This means that thinking during reading is present and necessarily presupposes the internal, hidden from consciousness, work of the articulatory apparatus, which translates perceived meanings into meanings, of which, in fact, inner speech consists.

Similar experiments conducted with primary schoolchildren turned out to be even more revealing than with adult subjects. For them, even a simple mechanical delay in articulation during mental work (clamping the tongue between the teeth) caused serious difficulties in reading and understanding the text and led to gross errors in writing.

A written text is the most extensive speech utterance, which involves a very long and complex path of mental work to translate meaning into meaning. In practice, this translation, as shown by A. N. Sokolov, is also carried out using an active process hidden from conscious control associated with the work of the articulatory apparatus.

Egocentric speech occupies an intermediate position between external and internal speech. This is speech directed not at a communication partner, but at oneself, not calculated and not implying any feedback from another person present at the moment and located next to the speaker. This speech is especially noticeable in children of middle preschool age when they play and seem to talk to themselves during the game.

Elements of this speech can also be found in an adult who, while solving a complex intellectual problem, thinking out loud, utters some phrases in the process of work that are understandable only to himself, apparently addressed to another, but not implying a mandatory response on his part. Egocentric speech is speech-reflection, serving not so much communication as thinking itself. It acts as external in form and internal in its psychological function. Having its original roots in external dialogical speech, it ultimately develops into internal speech. When difficulties arise in a person’s activities, the activity of his egocentric speech increases.

With the transition of external speech to internal egocentric speech gradually disappears. The decrease in its external manifestations should be viewed, as L. S. Vygotsky believed, as an increasing abstraction of thought from the sound side of speech, which is characteristic of internal speech. He was objected to by J. Piaget, who believed that egocentric speech is a rudimentary, relict form of speech that develops from internal to external. In such speech itself, he saw a manifestation of the child’s unsocialized, autistic thoughts. The gradual disappearance of egocentric speech was for him a sign that the child’s thought had acquired those qualities that the logical thinking of an adult possesses. Many years later, having become acquainted with the counterarguments of L. S. Vygotsky, J. Piaget recognized the correctness of his position.

So far we have talked about the development of speech thinking, i.e. that form of intellectualized speech that sooner or later

Ultimately turns into a thought. We are convinced that thinking in its development has its own sources, independent of speech, and follows its own laws for a long period of time, until thought flows into speech, and the latter becomes intellectualized, that is, understandable. We also know that even at the highest levels of development, speech and thinking do not completely coincide. This means that speech must have its own roots and laws of ontogenetic development. Let's look at some of them.

The experience of studying the process of speech development in children belonging to different peoples, countries, cultures and nations shows that, despite the fact that the differences in the structure and content of modern languages are striking, in general the process of a child’s acquisition of his native speech follows general laws everywhere. For example, children of all countries and peoples with amazing ease acquire language and master speech in childhood, and this process begins and ends for them at approximately the same time, going through the same stages. By the age of about 1 year, all children begin to pronounce individual words. At about 2 years of age, a child already speaks in two or three word sentences. By about 4 years of age, all children are able to speak quite freely.

One-year-old children usually already have quite a rich experience of interacting with the surrounding reality. They have clear ideas about their parents, about the environment, about food, about the toys with which they play. Long before children practically begin to use speech, their figurative world already has ideas that correspond to the words they are learning. In such conditions, prepared by previous experience of socialization, for mastering speech there is not much left for the child to do: mentally connect his existing ideas and images of reality with combinations of sounds corresponding to individual words. By the age of one, these sound combinations themselves are also already well known to the child: after all, he has heard them many times from an adult.

The next stage of speech development occurs at the age of approximately 1.5-2.5 years. At this stage, children learn to combine words, combine them into small phrases (two or three words), and they progress quite quickly from using such phrases to composing entire sentences.

After two or three word phrases, the child moves on to using other parts of speech and constructing sentences in accordance with the rules of grammar. At the previous and current stages of speech development, there are three ways to master language and further improve speech on this basis: imitation of adults and other people around them; the formation of conditioned reflex connections, associative in nature, between images of objects, actions, perceived phenomena and corresponding words or phrases; setting and testing hypotheses about the connection between words and images empirically (so-called operant conditioning). To this we should add a kind of childish speech ingenuity, which manifests itself in the fact that the child suddenly, completely independently, on his own initiative, begins to invent new words, pronounce phrases that he has never heard from an adult.

Pseudo-concepts

But we have already said that, while coinciding with the concept in its external form, in the achieved result of thinking, in its final product, the child does not at all coincide with the adult in the way of thinking, in the type of intellectual operations with the help of which he comes to a pseudo-concept. It is precisely because of this that the enormous functional significance of the pseudo-concept arises as a special, dual, internally contradictory form of children's thinking. If the pseudo-concept were not the dominant form of children's thinking, children's complexes, as is the case in experimental practice, where the child is not bound by a given meaning of a word, would diverge from the concepts of an adult in completely different directions.

Mutual understanding through words and verbal communication between an adult and a child would be impossible. This communication turns out to be possible only because children’s complexes actually coincide with the concepts of adults and meet with them. Concepts and the mental drawing of concepts turn out to be functionally equivalent, and thanks to this, an extremely important circumstance arises that determines, as already said, the greatest functional significance of a pseudo-concept: a child, thinking in complexes, and an adult, thinking in concepts, establish mutual understanding and verbal communication, since their thinking actually occurs in coinciding complexes of concepts.

We said already at the beginning of this chapter that the whole difficulty of the genetic problem of the concept lies in childhood is to understand this internal contradiction contained in children's concepts. From the very first days of its development, the word is a means of communication and mutual understanding between a child and an adult. It is precisely thanks to this functional moment of mutual understanding with the help of words, as Akh showed, that a certain meaning of a word arises and it becomes the bearer of a concept. Without this functional moment of mutual understanding, as Uznadze says, no sound complex could become the bearer of any meaning and no concepts could arise.

But, as is known, speech understanding between an adult and a child, speech contact occurs extremely early, and this, as already said, gives reason to many researchers to believe that concepts develop just as early. Meanwhile, as we have already said above, citing Uznadze’s opinion, full-fledged concepts develop in children’s thinking relatively late, while mutual speech understanding of a child and an adult is established very early.

“It is absolutely clear,” says Uznadze, “that words, not yet reaching the stage of fully developed concepts, take on the function of these latter and can serve as means of understanding between talking people" The researcher is faced with the task of revealing the development of those forms of thinking that should be considered not as concepts, but as their functional equivalents. This is a contradiction between the late development of the concept and early development speech understanding finds its real resolution in the pseudo-concept as a form of complex thinking that makes possible a coincidence in thinking and understanding between a child and an adult.

We have thus revealed both the reasons and the meaning of this exceptionally important form of children's complex thinking. It remains for us to say about the genetic significance of this final stage in the development of children's thinking. It is absolutely clear that due to the dual functional nature of the pseudo-concept, which we described above, this stage in the development of children's thinking acquires absolutely exceptional genetic significance.

It serves as a connecting link between complex thinking and conceptual thinking. It connects these two large stages in the development of children's thinking. It reveals to us the process of formation of children's concepts. Due to the contradiction inherent in it, it, being a complex, already contains the seed of a future concept that grows in it. Speech communication with adults, it thus becomes a powerful engine, a powerful factor in the development of children's concepts. The transition from complex thinking to thinking in concepts occurs imperceptibly for the child, because in his pseudo-concepts he practically coincides with the concepts of adults.

Thus, a peculiar genetic position is created, which represents rather general rule rather than an exception in the entire intellectual development of the child. This peculiar situation lies in the fact that the child first begins to apply and operate with concepts rather than realize them. The concept of “in oneself” and “for others” develops in a child before the concept of “for oneself.” The concept of “in oneself” and “for others,” already contained in a pseudo-concept, is the main genetic prerequisite for the development of a concept in the true sense of the word.

Thus, the pseudo-concept, considered as a special phase in the development of children's complex thinking, completes the entire second stage and opens the third stage in the development of children's thinking, serving as a connecting link between them. This is a bridge thrown between concrete, visual-figurative and abstract thinking.

The second phase in the same process of concept development is what might be called the stage of potential concepts. Under experimental conditions, a child who is in this phase of his development usually identifies a group of objects that he generalizes, united by one common characteristic.

Before us again is a picture that at first glance very closely resembles a pseudo-concept and which appearance can, just like a pseudo-concept, be accepted as a complete concept in the proper sense of the word. The exact same product could be obtained as a result of the thinking of an adult who operates with concepts.

This deceptive appearance, this external resemblance to a true concept, makes a potential concept akin to a pseudo-concept. But their nature is significantly different.

The distinction between true and potential concepts was introduced into psychology by Groos, who made this distinction the starting point of his analysis of concepts. “A potential concept,” says Groos, “can be nothing more than the action of habit. In this case, in its very elementary form it consists in the fact that we expect, or, better to say, we establish that similar occasions cause similar general impressions." "If the “potential concept” really is such as we just described it as an attitude toward the familiar, then it in any case, it appears very early in the child..." "I think it exists necessary condition“, preceding the appearance of intellectual assessments, but in itself has nothing intellectual” (33, p. 196). Thus, this potential concept is a pre-intellectual formation that arises extremely early in the history of the development of thinking.

In this regard, most modern psychologists agree that the potential concept in the form we have now described is already characteristic of animal thinking. In this sense, we think that Cro is absolutely right when he objects to the generally accepted statement that abstraction appears for the first time in adolescence. “Isolating abstraction,” he said, “can already be established in animals.”

And indeed, special experiments concerning the abstraction of form and color in the domestic chicken have shown that, if not a potential concept in the strict sense of the word, then something extremely close to it, consisting in the isolation or selection of individual characteristics, has its place at extremely early stages of development behavior in animals.

From this point of view, Groos is absolutely right, who, implying by a potential concept an orientation towards a usual reaction, refuses to see in it a sign of the development of children's thinking and classifies it from a genetic point of view as a pre-intellectual process. "Our original potential concepts," he says, "are pre-intellectual. The operation of these potential concepts can be elucidated without the assumption of logical processes." In this case, “the relationship between a word and what we call its meaning can sometimes be a simple association that does not contain a real meaning” (33, p. 201 et seq.).

If we turn to the child’s first words, we will see that they really approach these potential concepts in meaning. These concepts are potential, firstly, due to their practical relevance to a known range of objects, and secondly, due to the underlying process of isolating abstraction. They are concepts in a possibility that have not yet actualized that possibility. It is not a concept, but it is something that can become one.

In this sense, Bühler draws a completely legitimate analogy between the way a child uses one of its familiar words when seeing a new object, and how a monkey recognizes the resemblance to a stick in many things that at other times would not remind it of a stick, if it is in circumstances in which the stick is useful to her. Köhler's experiments with the use of tools in chimpanzees showed that a monkey, having once used a stick as a tool to master a goal, then extends this meaning of a tool to all other objects that have something in common with the stick and can perform the functions of the stick.

The external similarity with our concept is striking. And such a phenomenon really deserves the name of a potential concept. Köhler formulates the results of his observations of chimpanzees in this regard as follows. “If we say,” he said, “that a stick that catches your eye has acquired a certain functional meaning for certain positions, that this meaning extends to all other objects, whatever they may be at all, but having objectively known common features in the sense of form and density, then we directly arrive at the only view that coincides with the observed behavior of animals."

These experiments showed that the monkey begins to use the brim of a straw hat, shoes, wire, straw, towel as a stick, i.e. a wide variety of objects that have an oblong shape and can, in appearance, serve as a substitute for a stick. We see, therefore, that here there also arises a generalization of a number of specific objects in a certain respect.

And the whole difference with Groos’s potential concept lies only in the fact that there we are talking about similar impressions, and here we are talking about similar functional meaning. There, a potential concept is developed in the area of visual thinking, here - in the area of practical, effective thinking. This kind of motor concepts, or dynamic concepts, as Werner puts it, this kind of functional meaning, as Köhler puts it, is known to exist in children’s thinking for quite a long time, right up to the onset of school age. As is known, children's definition of concepts is of such a functional nature. For a child, defining an object or concept is equivalent to naming what this object does or, even more often, what can be done with this object.

When it comes to defining abstract concepts, a specific, usually effective situation, which is the equivalent of the child’s meaning of the word, comes to the fore when defining them. Messer, in his study of thinking and speech, cites an extremely typical definition of an abstract concept given by one of his first-year students. “Reason,” says the child, “is when I’m hot and don’t drink water.” This kind of concrete and functional meaning constitutes the only psychological basis potential concept.

We could recall that already in complex thinking of this kind potential concepts play an extremely important role, often being combined with the construction of complexes. So, for example, in an associative complex and in many other types of complex, as we saw above, the construction of a complex presupposes the identification of a known feature common to various elements.

True, it is characteristic of pure complex thinking that this characteristic is highly unstable, that it gives way to another characteristic, and that it is in no way privileged in comparison with all the others. This is not typical for a potential concept. Here, this feature, which serves as the basis for including an object in a known general group, is a privileged feature, abstracted from the specific group of features with which it is actually associated.

Let us recall that in the history of the development of our words, such potential concepts play an extremely important role. We gave above many examples of how every new word arises on the basis of highlighting one feature that catches the eye and serves as the basis for constructing a generalization of a number of objects called or denoted by the same word. These potential concepts often remain at this stage of their development, without turning into true concepts.

In any case, they play an extremely important role in the development of children's concepts. This role lies in the fact that here for the first time, with the help of abstraction of individual characteristics, the child destroys a specific situation, a specific connection of characteristics, and thereby creates the necessary precondition for a new unification of these characteristics on a new basis. Only mastery * of the process of abstraction, together with the development of complex thinking, can lead a child to the formation of true concepts. This formation of true concepts constitutes the fourth and final phase in the development of children's thinking.

A concept arises when a number of abstracted features are again synthesized and when the abstract synthesis thus obtained becomes the main form of thinking with the help of which the child comprehends and comprehends the reality around him. At the same time, as we said above, the experiment shows that the decisive role in the formation of a true concept belongs to the word. It is with the help of the word that the child voluntarily directs his attention to certain signs, with the help of the word he synthesizes them, with the help of the word he symbolizes abstract concept and operates with it as the highest sign of all that human thinking has created.

True, even in complex thinking the role of the word clearly appears. Complex thinking in the sense as we described it above is impossible without a word, which acts as a family name, uniting groups of objects related in impression. In this sense, we, unlike a number of authors, distinguish complex thinking as a well-known stage in the development of verbal thinking from that wordless visual thinking that characterizes the representations of animals and which other authors, like Werner, also call complex due to its inherent tendency to merge individual impressions.

In this sense, these authors tend to equate the processes of condensation and movement, as they appear in dreams, and between the complex thinking of primitive peoples, which is one of the highest forms of verbal thinking, the product of the long historical evolution of the human intellect and the inevitable predecessor of thinking in concepts. Some authorities, like Volkelt, go even further and tend to identify the emotionally similar complex thinking of spiders with the primitive verbal thinking of a child.

From our point of view, there is a fundamental difference between both, which separates the product of biological evolution, the natural form of thinking, from the historically emerged form of human intelligence. However, the recognition that the word plays a decisive role in complex thinking does not in the least force us to identify this role of the word when thinking in complexes and when thinking in concepts.

On the contrary, the very difference between a complex and a concept is primarily that one generalization is the result of one functional use of a word, while another arises as a result of a completely different functional application this word. The word is a sign. This sign can be used in different ways, it can be applied in different ways. It can serve as a means for various intellectual operations, and it is the various intellectual operations performed with the help of the word that lead to the main difference between a complex and a concept.

I draw the word, I draw the thoughts
The speech of a child from one to two years old is the repetition of syllables and words, that is, echolalia. The child first repeats them for pleasure, without purposefulness and without trying to elicit a response. Until this point, most parents are unaware that their children may have speech delays. Most children develop monologue speech by the age of two; these children speak in short phrases of 2-3 words. By the age of 2.5, attentive parents begin to pay attention to the fact that “ours still only pronounces “mom” and “dad,” but the neighbor Mashenka is already recite Barto’s poems by heart”... It also happens differently. The child speaks and understands absolutely everything, but at the age of five his speech consists of short, chopped phrases. So why is he diagnosed not with speech delay, but with psycho-speech development? The fact is that delayed speech development is not a problem with pronunciation, as amateur parents mistakenly think. A child of five years old, according to the norm, may not pronounce 10-13 sounds. The development of speech is closely related to the development of thinking.

Often a child is brought to our Harlequin studio, and the mother declares from the doorway, “teach me how to speak.” Classes begin. But a month or two passes, and the mother indignantly declares: “Why are you teaching your child all this nonsense - cubes, drawing some kind of flowers and whiskers for cats. I brought him here to develop SPEECH!?” For some reason, parents have the erroneous opinion that speech can be developed without developing thinking.

Thought cannot arise, flow, or exist outside of language, outside of speech. We think in words that we pronounce out loud or say to ourselves, i.e. thinking occurs in speech form. People who are equally fluent in several languages are quite clearly aware of which language they are thinking in at any given moment. In speech, a thought is not only formulated, but also formed and developed.
Special devices can be used to record hidden speech (articulatory) micromovements of the lips, tongue, and larynx, which always accompany human mental activity, for example, when solving various kinds of problems. Only people who are deaf and mute from birth, who do not even speak kinetic (“manual”) speech, think on the basis of images.

Since speech is a form of existence of thought, there is unity between speech and thinking. A word is not a label pasted as an individual name on a separate object. It always characterizes the object or phenomenon denoted by it, that is, the word is a product of thinking.

How can parents influence the development of the speech-thinking connection?

Let's look at this from the perspective of... a child's drawing. Let's imagine that a child sees a cat sitting in the snow.

A two year old says:“Kisa - meow-meow! Kitty bye-bye"
A two-year-old child simply states a fact - voices what he sees. The child does not address anyone, does not try to provoke a response. If an adult wants to establish a dialogue, then the adult plays the leading role. The child pronounces existing knowledge without making logical connections: here is a cat. The cat says meow-meow. And in his facilitated speech, this part of the voicing of the situation looks like “kitty - meow-meow!” The child is still simplifying what he sees: the cat is lying down, which means she is sleeping. So much for “kisa - bye-bye”.

If you ask a child to draw a cat, it will be a chaotic mixture of lines in which nothing can be guessed, because the child’s thinking does not yet see the connections, it is only learning to analyze. Breaking a picture into details and searching for relationships is not yet something that can two year old baby. Developing a child’s speech and thinking, you can talk to him, study with manuals, or you can... draw!

Show the cat, pay attention to the details that, due to insufficient development of thinking, eluded the child. Help your child draw a round tummy with finger paints, put stripes on the cat’s body with your fingers, and draw a mustache with a felt-tip pen. Make eyes out of plasticine, gather the child’s fingers into a pinch and use finger paint to make prints on the sheet - this is a cat running through the snow - stomp, stomp, stomp. Snow - brrrr, cold! The cat is cold. Cut out a piece of colored paper (this will be a blanket) and cover the pussy in the drawing. Tell the pussy - “bye-bye, sleep, pussy!”

Similarly, you can choose an object every day and draw, developing the child’s concept of colors, shapes, natural phenomena and the rest. Thus, through primary drawing, both thinking and speech will develop.

A three year old child says:“Mom, look, the kitty is lying down. A beautiful kitty, black. She’s walking.”
The speech of a child at 3 years old is grammatically richer; it already has a focus - to draw the attention of another person to an event. However, the child is still at the level mental development not ready to enter into discussions and draw complex logical conclusions. He makes them himself and reports them. But some logical connections are already being made - although the cat is lying, for a three-year-old this no longer means that she is sleeping, because the cat has its head raised and its eyes open. For now, such conclusions are not always logical.

For a child, everything is simple - if a cat doesn’t sleep, it means it’s walking. At the same time, the use of connecting adverbs like “because” is not always found at this age, since the use of such connectives requires a developed connection between the hemispheres of the brain and good logical thinking. If the mother does not agree with the child, offering her own consideration of the situation, for example, saying that the cat is waiting here for its owner, the child will most likely agree. The thought process is still very mobile, and speech underdevelopment does not allow one to defend one’s opinion. It's easier to agree.

From the point of view of creativity, normally at this age the time of “cephalopods” begins. Therefore, a kitty can look like a bun with many dads and a tail. The child is already learning analysis and synthesis. Now he understands that objects can be split into component parts (a cat has paws, a tail, whiskers), and can also make a synthesis - try to make a whole out of parts. Now is the time to offer your child his first puzzles, prefabricated construction sets.

The peculiarity of thinking, so clearly manifested in drawing - in objects and in speech addressed to it, the child sees only individual details, and not the whole picture. Therefore, the fact that we see a cat in the picture can only be guessed by certain features such as the tail.
If you have chosen an artistic and aesthetic method of child development, it’s time to introduce your baby to orientation in space (a cat sits in the snow UNDER a tree), start teaching how to compare objects (the cat is small, and the girl next to her is big. The bush is low, and the tree is tall. You can deepen your knowledge of the color palette - blue, pink. Mathematical knowledge can also appear in the picture - there is ONE cat in the picture, but you can stick on MANY snowflakes from sequins.

Four-five year old says:“Look, mom, what a beautiful black cat! She is lying down because she has been walking and is tired. Mom, don’t the kitty’s paws get cold?”
At this age, a child normally no longer just speaks, recording facts, but makes generalizations and logical conclusions. And, if he cannot find a simple solution, he asks his interlocutor. This is the time of “why”, the child expands his knowledge and vocabulary every minute.
The child’s thinking masters logic.. If you have developed creative thinking child, it is much easier for him than other children to master this stage of development. Now the child learns to draw abstract conclusions.

Now the child can imagine an object without seeing it. So, looking at transparent ice, a transparent glass and glass, the child will conclude what “transparency” is. And when you read to him in a fairy tale about the “transparent wings” that the elves gave to Thumbelina, a specific image of these wings will appear in the child’s head.

It is at this age, when you look at children, it becomes clear whose parents emphasized super-intellectual development (counting, reading from the cradle, etc.), and whose parents focused on the development of the child’s thinking as a whole. At the age of 5, the most developed children are those with whom they remember to engage in creativity. Judge for yourself - they have developed fine motor skills (they drew and sculpted), a three-dimensional and planar vision of the world has been developed, and the development of interhemispheric connections has been stimulated thanks to working with scissors and plasticineography. Mathematics is easier for them, since they have a clearer understanding of fragmentation into parts and spatial orientation. An interesting observation - if you compare a group of children with whom they read from the cradle, did tasks based on textbooks with an emphasis on mathematics or reading, and children who were developed through creativity, it turns out that “creative” children are more diligent than “superintellectuals” They have a higher concentration and are attentive to details. If there is a difference in knowledge, “creative” children quickly overcome this gap and begin to noticeably outperform children from the “superintellectual” group.

Following the development of thinking, the speech of a child at the age of 4.5-5 years makes a sharp leap - complex and complex phrases appear, the child uses the conjunction “because” in his speech. Now the child not only reports something, but immediately shares conclusions or his knowledge, logical cause-and-effect connections, even if they are not entirely correct. And it is at this time that parents like to write down their baby’s “pearls.”

With normal development, at the same age, the child’s thinking finally begins to avalanche-like connect all the knowledge accumulated so far. The child learns cause-and-effect relationships, and his speech becomes like a walking encyclopedia. Despite this, in a child’s speech there are often numerous contradictions and explanations of the same fact in different ways. In thinking, a child does not yet adhere to general laws; he, rather, operates with particular explanations of each fact along with other particular explanations. The ability to generalize and deduce at this age is still underdeveloped.

However, thinking is already capable of making generalizations, which is expressed not only in speech, but also in drawing. The parameters of the drawn cat are unlikely to be maintained, but the cat will already be quite recognizable by all the necessary parts, right down to the mustache. The child may try to give the picture an emotional character. For example, using claws to indicate that the cat is angry, or using a bow drawn on the cat’s neck to emphasize that it is domestic. But while still a child, it will be difficult to separate reality from fairy tales and think creatively in a primitive way. For example, to portray a kind cat, a child will draw a human smile on the cat. And also the cat can be depicted in a skirt or sitting at a table, like a person, or in an unrealistically turquoise color. At this age, children are egocentric; it is more important for them to convey their idea to you in a drawing, rather than to draw an academically correct drawing.

At one time, thinking and speech can exist separately from each other. Thus, a small child can have both speech (chattering) without thinking, and visual-effective thinking without relying on speech. Once upon a time, even adults chatter without using their heads, and scientists solve some complex problems using first of all thinking, only later formalizing the already found solution into speech - anything can happen... However, in its developed form in adults and For thinking people, speech is meaningful, and thinking is based primarily on speech. is born with the help of language, develops with the help of language and is expressed in speech. Thinking and speech mutually support each other.

Thanks to the formulation and consolidation in the word, the thought does not disappear or fade away, barely having time to arise. It is firmly fixed in speech formulation - oral or even written. Therefore, there is always the opportunity to return to this thought again, think it over even more deeply, check it and, in the course of reasoning, compare it with other thoughts.

However, men also use telling their thoughts out loud to someone to clarify their thoughts and wording. Speech helps self-understanding: understanding the meaning being expressed. By formulating his thoughts out loud, for others, a person thereby formulates them for himself. Such formulation, consolidation, and recording of thoughts in words means the division of thoughts, helps to focus attention on various moments and parts of this thought and contributes to a deeper understanding. Thanks to this, detailed, consistent, systematic reasoning becomes possible, i.e. a clear and correct comparison with each other of all the main thoughts that arise in the thinking process.

In addition, speech helps build proper thinking and solve problems. Pronunciation (first speaking out loud, then to oneself, in inner speech) is a common technique for helping thinking, for its proper alignment. Some schoolchildren and even adults often experience difficulties in solving a problem until they formulate theirs out loud. Clearly speaking and articulating definitions, rules, and steps makes it easier to solve problems.

Speech helps thoughts too. To remember a thought that comes to you, it is very useful to say it out loud. When you say it and hear it from yourself, it will be easier to remember its essence and basic formulations.

DEVELOPMENT OF SPEECH AND THINKING

The subject to which this chapter is devoted—the development of speech and thinking, especially the development of higher forms of thinking in childhood—is difficult and complex. Therefore, I will allow myself to start with the simplest - with the most well-known concrete facts, so elementary that I am afraid of earning the reproach of extreme simplification of a big problem. But I see no other way to get closer to the huge and complex issue immediately from the theoretical side.

I want to start with a well-known experience - with an attempt to determine the most important stages in the development of a child’s thinking based on his story from a picture. It is known that the technique proposed by A. Binet and widely used by V. Stern is extremely simple and clear. They take a simple picture that depicts, for example, a city or peasant family or prisoners in prison, show the picture to a child of 3,7, 12 years old and find out how each of them describes the same plot. At the same time, researchers say: since all children are given the same object of thinking, therefore, we have the right to say that thinking develops in the early, most important stages as it is revealed in the child’s story.

It is also known what conclusions can be drawn from such an experience. By the way, these are the conclusions on which much of the psychology of thinking is based. It turns out that children of early preschool age tell the picture, naming individual objects, hence the conclusion is drawn: the preschooler thinks of the world as a system of individual things and objects. The student already establishes some simple actions that are performed by the depicted objects or faces, from which the conclusion is drawn: the student thinks of the world as a system of acting objects and people. Finally, we know that the older schoolchild moves to the attribute stage and then to the relationship stage and perceives complex relationships between individual objects. Hence the conclusion is drawn: an older student perceives the world as a system of complex relationships in which people and things exist with each other.

The central fact, which is of fundamental importance for the psychology of thinking, lies in the revision of those provisions that we have just indicated. Doubts about the meaning of the data that were obtained in the experiment with a story based on pictures arose a long time ago, and it was necessary to instill these doubts in people who approach the question extremely simply. Indeed, what does experience say? First, the child perceives objects, then actions, then relationships, that is, the connection of things. Does this really resemble what we know about child development in general? Let's try to continue this series down, consider how the child will perceive the picture or the world in even more early age. Obviously, he must perceive not only objects or things, but the smallest properties and qualities of things, because the thing itself is already quite complex connection individual characteristics and relationships.

We can say frankly: everything we know about the child contradicts this idea. Everything we know about the child says: a child of early and preschool age perceives things as a segment of reality in an extremely concrete connectedness of these things. The initial perception of individual objects, which we attributed to the child on the basis of experience with a picture, is in fact a later stage, arising in further development child, and everything we know about the development of thinking in a young child speaks in favor of the fact that this experience, when continued, leads by some miracle to false ideas, i.e. reverse process development of thinking in a child.

The child thinks in whole connected blocks. This moment is called syncretism. Syncretism is a feature of children's thinking that gives the child the opportunity to think in whole blocks, without dismembering or separating one object from another. The syncretic nature of children's thinking, that is, thinking in whole situations, in whole connected parts, is so strong that it still persists in the area of verbal thinking in a schoolchild and is a transformative form of thinking in a preschool child. It is the inability to single out a separate thing, to name it, that is especially clearly reflected in two examples that I borrow from J. Piaget.

The child is asked: “Why does the sun warm?” He replies: “Because it is yellow, because it is tall, it stands high.” “Explain” for such a child means citing a number of other facts and properties, impressions and observations that are directly related to one impression, one image. That the sun holds on and does not fall, that it is yellow, hot, that there are clouds near it - all that the child sees is connected together, he does not separate one from the other.

In an older child, syncretism causes confusion, that is, the combination of everything with everything that is only combined in the external impression. This remains in the speech of a school-age child: the child moves in such syncretic wholes. P. P. Blonsky correctly calls this property incoherent coherence of thinking. “Incoherent” is understandable: after all, the child thinks, pointing out that the sun does not fall because it is hot. Much here seems incoherent. At the same time, this is correctly called “connectedness,” because the child connects what we, adults, necessarily dismember. For him, the fact that the sun is yellow and that it does not fall is merged into one impression that we share.

Thus, syncretism lies in the incoherent coherence of thinking, that is, in the predominance of subjective connection, a connection arising from direct impression, over objective coherence. This results in objective incoherence and subjective universal coherence. The child perceives that everything is connected to everything. From the objective side, this means that the child takes the connection of impressions as the connection of things. What a child perceives as a connection of impressions, he perceives as a connection of things. What happens in the child’s brain from the physiological side is relatively known: this is well reflected in I.P. Pavlov’s interesting position about irradiation, i.e., the initially diffuse, diffuse stage of excitation, which accompanies the first impressions, bringing to life a whole complex associated with this impression.

How did old-time psychologists, subjectivist psychologists, imagine the development of thinking? They pointed out that the state of a newborn child can be represented as a chaos of some sensations, primarily a chaos of incoherent things, because where can connections come from when there is no experience? The child has never seen objects, say a bed, a person, a table, a chair. If only the sense organs function, then, naturally, the child should have a chaos of ideas, a mixture of warm and sweet, black and yellow, various unrelated sensations and properties of objects. Gradually, sensations accumulate, and groups are formed from individual sensations. From here things come out, then things are put into groups, and finally the child moves on to perceive the world.

Experimental studies show, however, that the opposite is true. A young child perceives the world syncretically - in whole large groups or situations. Another physiological consideration speaks in favor of this.

I. P. Pavlov studied the properties of the so-called complex of stimuli and showed that a complex of known stimuli causes a different effect than each stimulus taken separately, individual stimuli or taken next to each other. First, in Pavlov’s laboratory they began to work with individual stimuli, then they moved on to a complex. Thus, in laboratory practice, an experiment is first carried out with individual stimuli, then with a complex. What happens in a child’s life? I think that at first the child deals with a complex of impressions and objects, with the situation as a whole. The child is fed by the mother, which means that the irritant is the mother, her clothes, face, voice;

the fact that the child is picked up and placed in a certain position; satiety when feeding;

then the child is put to bed. This is a whole situation that unfolds in front of the child. Therefore, Pavlov says: if in the laboratory we later came to a complex of stimuli, then in life, genetically, the complex of stimuli for a child is primary, the child first thinks in a complex, then in individual things.

However, it is easy to see that experience with picture understanding says the opposite.

One more factual consideration.

Experience with the use of pictures shows that a 3-year-old child sees individual objects, while an older child thinks of the world as a system of actions. It turns out that if you show the same picture (let’s say, “Prisoner in Prison”) to a three-year-old child, it will be: “Man, another person, window, mug, bench,” and for a preschooler it will be: “A man is sitting, another person is looking.” out the window, the mug is on the bench.” But we know that both a three-year-old child and a young child, on the contrary, determine all the arranged figures, all objects according to their functions, that is, they determine them through actions. For a child, they are the primary thing. And when we look for the initial, primary word, we discover that this is the name of an action, not an object;

The child names a word denoting an action earlier than a word denoting an object.

Summing up the material, we come to the conclusion: a fatal contradiction has created between the development of thinking, which paints a story from a picture, and everything that we know about the development of thinking in life. In both cases, the relationship turns out to be upside down. It is interesting that all these considerations are verified by experiments and facts. You can take a thousand children and once again prove that this is what happens with a picture. This is indeed an indisputable fact, but it must be interpreted differently.

Let us make one of the simplest observations that we can explain and which will point the way to a new interpretation.

If everything we know about a child's thinking contradicts what the picture story gives, then everything we know about speeches child, this confirms. We know that a child first speaks single words, then phrases, later the child develops a circle of fragmentary words and phenomena, then a five-year-old child establishes connections between words within one sentence;

an eight-year-old already pronounces complex subordinate clauses. A theoretical assumption arises: can a story based on a picture depict the development of children's thinking? Is it possible to understand whether a child thinks as he says, in naive expressions? Maybe genetically the matter is different: the picture states only the fact that the child composes phrases from fragmentary words, then more and more connects the word within one sentence and, finally, moves on to a coherent story? Maybe the child does not think of the world first as individual things, then as actions, then as signs and relationships? Maybe the child speaks first in separate words, then in simple sentences, and then connects these sentences?

Let's carry out an experiment, because only experiments can give the final answer. There are several simple ways to do this, which seem extremely ingenious to me. Let's try to exclude children's speech, let's try to get answers to the picture in some other way, not through words. If the assumption is correct that the child does not think of the world as separate things, but only knows how to name individual words and cannot formulate their connections, then we will try to do without words. Let's ask two children not to tell, but to play what is shown in the picture. It turns out that the children’s game based on the picture sometimes lasts 20-30 minutes, and first of all and mainly in the game the relationships that are in the picture are captured. Simply put, if you ask a child to dramatize a picture rather than tell it, then, according to Stern’s experiments, a 4-5 year old child dramatizes the picture “In Prison” the way a 12-year-old teenager tells it. The child understands perfectly well that people are in prison: this is accompanied by a complex narrative about how they were attacked, how they were taken away, that one looks out the window - he wants to be free. This also includes a very complicated story about how a nanny was recently fined for not having a ticket on the tram. In a word, we get a typical image of what we observe in the stories of 12-year-old children.

Here the psychologist’s eyes are opened to the process of children’s thinking, to the history of the development of children’s thinking, as the story shows in the picture and how it is revealed during dramatization. Let me come to the other side of the same experience.

Let's try to do it as some experimenters did before us. We will try to show whether it is true that a 3-year-old child does not perceive relationships, but perceives individual things or objects, and the connection between them is established later. If this is so, then we must expect that if in an experiment we allow a child to act with things between which there is little connection, then the child will not perceive this connection and will treat the objects as separate, without a connection between them. This was the focus of the work of V. Eliasberg, who developed a methodology for substantiating special experience. Its essence is as follows. They place a number of colored sheets of paper on the table, bring the child to the table, do not give any instructions, sometimes pay attention to the pieces of paper that are located in front of him. Papers of two colors: bright red and blue. The child reaches for the pieces of paper and turns them over. Under one of them (under the blue one) there is a cigarette glued. The child pays attention to it and tries to tear it off. How will he proceed next? If the child is in the stage that is revealed in the test - with a story based on a picture, then we must expect that the test subject will then act with separate pieces of paper, at best with a bunch of pieces of paper, and will not establish any connections, any relationships between objects.

Experience shows the opposite. A child, starting from one and a half to two years old and, as a rule, up to 3 years old, always forms the most common connection between a blue piece of paper and opens cigarettes. When the pieces of paper are in disarray, the child then opens only the blue ones and leaves the red ones aside. If after the first time you change the color of the pieces of paper and put orange and brown ones instead of red and blue, the child does the same. He opens the orange one, opens the brown one, under which there is a cigarette, and again establishes a connection between the color and the presence of a cigarette. It is extremely interesting that he establishes a connection much better than an older student, for whom experience and the whole situation are already much more divided into separate things that have nothing in common with each other. An adult makes connections even worse than a high school student. Therefore, Eliasberg considers it incredible that a child, who easily establishes relationships between things through the simplest experience, thinks of the world as separate objects and does not know how to form a connection - a man stands at the window, but would only see a man and a window.

Of decisive importance for Eliasberg were experiments with non-speaking children - with alaliks and deaf-mutes. Here, many experiments with the analysis of non-verbal behavior force us to conclude that a young child can be accused of a tendency to connect everything with everything; For him, as experience has shown, the extraordinary difficulty lies in dismembering the connection, in the ability to isolate individual moments. Therefore, the general idea that the child does not connect actions with each other disappears.

Doubts about the correctness of the genetic curve in the development of thinking, which the story draws from the picture, arose a long time ago. Stern drew attention to the fact that if a mental task is difficult for a child, he descends to a lower level. If a child sees a more complex picture, then the 12-year-old begins to talk like a 7-year-old, and the 7-year-old begins to talk like a 3-year-old. To prove this, Stern asked the child to write a story about a picture in front of his eyes. And again, all children who are forced to use written language to tell a story are reduced by another step.

This experience brought Stern triumph. Experience has shown that as the task becomes more complex (if we study the reproduction of a picture to memory), the quality of the story immediately decreases. Consequently, according to the external impression that has formed about the thinking process, it can be assumed that first there was thinking about individual things, then about the actions of these things, then about the signs and, finally, about the connections of things. But here comes another group of experiments that overturn Stern’s entire construction, and one can only be surprised that earlier they (the experiments) did not lead to a revision of the issue in this direction.

The first experience is as follows. If we take children from different strata of the social environment: peasants and cultured urban children, backward and normal, then among the peasants living in Germany, the child in the story from the picture is delayed in development during the transition from stage to stage in comparison with other strata. When Stern tried to compare the thinking of a child from an educated and uneducated environment, it turned out that in everyday thinking, children from an uneducated environment lag behind slightly, and in many cases, almost do not lag behind their peers from an educated environment in the content of thinking. On the contrary, experience with the analysis of the speech of children of various strata gave full correspondence with data on the development of speech, for example, from observations of the development of verbal speech and syntax of peasant children, it turned out that the child describes a picture as he speaks in life. Here a simple conclusion could be drawn, and if psychologists could be satisfied with this, then no further experiments should be carried out. But psychologists take a different view, believing that a story based on a picture is indicative not of how a child speaks in general in life, but of the specified experimental conditions.

The second experiment, which drew the attention of P.P. Blonsky and which also led to a revision of all experiments with a story based on a picture, shows: if we invite a child to present the story not orally, but in writing, then we immediately discover that a 12-year-old describes how 3 year old. The written narrative of a 12-year-old boy resembles the oral narrative of a 3-year-old. Can we really admit that just because we gave a child a pencil, this made the task of thinking more difficult? If a child writes poorly, does this mean that in thinking he immediately descends from the stage of relationships to the stage of objects? This is not true. Meanwhile, it is a fact that a 12-year-old child writes the way a 3-year-old child speaks. Simply put, this means that telling a story based on a picture gives a distorted picture of the development of a child’s thinking. In fact, the story reflects the stage at which one or another form of speech of the child stands; If we move on to written speech, then the experience will reflect the specificity of the child’s written speech.

Confusion in child psychology arose because psychologists could not distinguish the development of speech from the development of thinking - this is the most important conclusion from which the theoretical consideration of this issue begins.

By analyzing the test with a picture, we showed that a test with an insufficiently critical attitude towards it can mislead us, that is, falsely show the path of development of children's perception of the world and children's thinking about the world. At the same time, an experimental test of a young child’s perception, with the exception of his speech, shows that the child does not perceive the world at all as a quantity or sum of individual things, that his perception is syncretic in nature, that is, it is holistic, more or less connected into groups that his perception and idea of the world is situational.

If we approach these facts from the point of view of the development of children's speech, we will see that at an early age the child actually develops individual words, then a connection arises between two words, and later sentences with a subject and predicate appear. Then a developmental stage occurs when the child already speaks complex sentences and, finally, establishes a connection between the individual elements of the main and subordinate clauses.

Analysis of experience with a picture basically makes it possible, therefore, to dissect the development of thinking and speech in a child and show that the development of thinking and speech in him does not coincide, but follows different paths.

We will try to correct the misunderstandings that may arise in the interpretation of the facts obtained.

The first misunderstanding may be of the following nature. We argued that a 3-year-old child describes a picture the way he talks, but he perceives and thinks about the picture differently. Consequently, if we wanted to symbolically depict the curve of development of speech and thinking, then the individual points of these curves would not coincide. But does this mean that the development of speech and thinking is completely independent of each other, does it mean that the child does not show a certain degree of development of thinking in speech? This misunderstanding needs to be clarified. We must show that, although the development of thinking and speech in a child does not coincide, they develop in close dependence on each other.

The purpose of this chapter is to show that the development of a child’s speech influences and restructures thinking.

Let's start with the second task, as it is simpler. In order to understand it, you must first establish that the child’s thinking, like a number of other functions, begins to develop before the development of speech. In the first years of life, the development of thinking proceeds more or less independently, but within certain limits it coincides with the development curve of speech; Even in adults, the thinking function may remain to some extent independent and unrelated to speech.

We know simple experiments, for example, Köhler's experiments on animal psychology. These experiments establish the pre-verbal roots of thinking. In the field of child development, there are studies by other authors, for example, the experiments of Tudor-Hart and G. Getzer on a 6-month-old child. These authors monitored his handling of objects; they could observe the preliminary stage, or the beginnings of thinking, with which the child operates in a specific situation, manipulating objects, using them as simple tools. The rudiments of thinking are more definitely visible in a child of 10 months. A child of 9-12 months, in addition to instinctive, innate reactions, in addition to conditioned reflexes, already displays skills that are developed at an early age. He has a rather complex apparatus for adapting to a new situation. For example, when a child uses tools, he grasps the basic relationships between objects, which for the most part are still contained in their simplest forms.

All 42 10-month-olds observed by Tudor-Hart and Getzer did this; when the rattle, to which the cord was tied, fell to the ground, they caught the connection between the rattle and the cord and, after a vain attempt to reach the rattle with their hand, they pulled the cord and in this way tried to get the toy.

Moreover, observations have shown that a child of this age is not only able to grasp the simplest relationships between objects, not only is able to use one object as a tool in the simplest way, but in order to move another object towards him, he himself creates connections and complex relationships between objects . The child tries to use one object as a tool for mastering another object much more often than the objective situation allows. The baby tries to move another ball with one ball not only when the ball lies close and he can reach it with his hand, but also when the ball lies several yards in front of him and when there is no contact between the tool and the object. The Germans call this "Werkzeugdenken" in the sense that thinking is manifested in the process of using the simplest tools. In a 12-month-old child, thinking manifests itself much more fully and precedes the formation of speech. Consequently, these are the pre-verbal roots of child intelligence in the proper sense of the word.

Lately we have got our hands on extremely valuable experiments with so-called representations. We know what representation is in old psychology: these are traces of irritation emanating from the environment, which from the subjective side consists in the fact that we often, with our eyes closed, reproduce more or less vividly in an internal image. From the objective side, we still do not know exactly the mechanism of representation; we are talking, apparently, about the revival of trace stimuli.

Experiments with so-called eidetics made it possible to experiment with ideas. Eidetic representation is a degree in the development of memory that, genetically, occupies a middle place between perception, on the one hand, and representation in the proper sense of the word, on the other. Since, on the one hand, representations are memory in the sense that a person sees an image when this object is not in front of him, then, consequently, we are dealing with representation as the material of thinking. On the other hand, since a person localizes the images previously visible on the screen and these images obey the main laws of perception, we have the opportunity to experiment with these images as perception: we can zoom in and out of the screen, illuminate it differently, introduce various stimuli and see what this will work.

IN last years E. Jaensch performed the following experiments: he took 14 eidetics and performed an experiment with them in the following situation. He showed each of the subjects a real fruit, then at some distance showed a stick with a hook. After the objects were removed, the eidetics saw the corresponding images on the screen: a fruit, a stick and a hook. When the subjects were given instructions to think about how good it would be to eat this fruit, 10 out of 14 got a consistent result: if before the stick and hook were isolated in the field of view, then after the instruction the stick and hook came closer in the field of view and came into position , which is actually needed in order to get the fruit with a stick. A certain distraction of attention from the stick led to the fact that this connection was again upset and the stick moved away from the hook.

It is known that in our perceptions individual objects turn out to be mobile and very easily change in terms of size, location and depend on the attention directed to them. When observing eidetics, the mobility of images turns out to be extremely large.

In this way, Jaensch was able to show that both in representations and in trace stimuli, direct visual fusion of individual objects very easily occurs. These experiments gave reason to believe that Jaensch had obtained a model of the way in which not only the animals in Köhler's experiments, but also children who do not have speech, mentally solve a problem. This happens as follows. If there are no closely standing objects in the field of eidetic vision, then in the field of representation, in the field of trace stimuli, a special combination of objects occurs, corresponding to the task, the situation in which the child is currently located.

This form of thinking is called natural because it is natural, primary. This thinking is based on some primary properties of the nervous apparatus. The natural form of thinking is distinguished, firstly, by the concreteness of what is in front of the child, the closure of what is available in more or less ready-made situations and, secondly, by dynamics, i.e. eidetics produce combinations, movement of known images and forms. In other words, they produce in the sensory field the same changes that the hands produce in the motor field where a person takes a stick and moves it in the desired direction. The connection that actually closes in the motor field also closes in the sensory field.

I think that this experience, the physiological significance of which we do not yet fully know, does not contradict what we know about the functioning of the brain. We know that there are not two centers that work independently of each other;

on the contrary, as a general rule, any two centers simultaneously excited in the brain tend to close the connection with each other. This means that all excited centers establish some kind of connection with each other. Consequently, in the presence of two impressions, two conditioned reflexes, it is possible to assume that these two impressions will give a third focus associated with the task itself (with the desire to get the fruit). The third focus is associated with the two first impressions, therefore, a movement of stimuli occurs in the cerebral cortex. We see how experiments with eidetics have made a shift in those assumptions that were previously held; we see that from experiments we can draw completely unexpected conclusions in comparison with what we knew before about the influence of nerve centers on each other.

Let us now imagine to what extent the entire development of a child’s thinking changes depending on the work of the sensory apparatus: when the child’s eyes are directed at two objects, a closure occurs, a connection is formed between one object and another, the child moves from the natural form of thinking to the cultural one that humanity has developed in the process of social relations. This occurs when the child moves on to thinking with the help of speech, when he begins to talk, when his thinking ceases to be only a movement of excitation from track to track, when the child moves on to speech activity, which is nothing more than a system of very subtle differentiated elements, a system of combinations of the results of past experience. We know that no speech utterance exactly repeats another utterance, but is always a combination of utterances. We know that words are not just partial reactions, but a particle of a complex mechanism, that is, a mechanism of connection and combination with other elements.

Let's take our cases, changes in sound when declension by case; lamp, lamps, lamp. Already one change in the final sound changes the nature of the connection of a given word with other words. In other words, before us appear those elements that have, as it were, a special connection, so that we can shift, combine, move relationships and, through combination, create a new whole.

It turns out something like a box with a mosaic, where there are extremely many different elements and where, with the most diverse connections, it is possible, by combining elements, to create more and more new wholes. What emerges is, as it were, a special system of skills, which by nature are material for thinking, that is, for creating new combinations, in other words, means for developing a reaction that has never been developed in direct experience.

Let's get back to the experiments. They show that decisive changes in the child’s behavior occur when the child, in an experience with the eidetic use of tools, introduces words—speech. Jaensch has already shown that this entire operation, which is simple from an eidetic point of view—the “tool and fruit” system—is immediately upset as soon as the child tries to verbally formulate what he must do and what is happening in front of him; in this case, the child immediately moves on to new forms of solving the problem.

The same facts take place in Lipmann's well-known experiments. He led the subject into a room where he was asked to perform a more or less complex operation, say, to get a ball from a cabinet, and the ball lay on the very edge of the cabinet, very unstable, and it was necessary to use a tool in order to get the ball. For the first time, Lipmann told the subject: “Please take the ball out of the cabinet,” and watched how the subject performed the task. Another time he said: “Please take the ball out of the cabinet,” and as soon as the subject began to perform the task, he gave the signal: “Stop!” and asked: “First, tell me in words how you will do this,” and again watched how the subject performed the task. The researcher compared how the task was performed with a preliminary verbal solution and without words, in practice. It turns out that the nature of the solution to the problem is completely different; We solve the same problem differently, depending on whether we aim our eyes at a lying ball or solve it using words. The first time the reaction comes from action, when I want to measure the distance from an object lying in front of me with my hands, the second time I solve the problem with words, I analyze the whole situation in words. It is clear that with the help of words you can make any combinations that cannot be done with your hand. In words you can convey any image that corresponds to the size of the ball and its color. In words, you can give an object additional properties, including even those that are not needed when you first complete the task.

It will be clear if I repeat after Lipmann that in words I can extract the most extract, the most essential thing in a situation and leave out of the field of action the properties of the situation that are unimportant from the point of view of my task. Words help, firstly, to extract an extract and, secondly, to combine any images. Instead of climbing on a cabinet or taking a stick to get a ball, with the help of words in one minute I can draw two or three plans of action and settle on one of them. Thus, when solving a problem in words and in deeds, a completely different principle of approach to completing the task results.

I had the opportunity to observe how an experiment proceeds with children who were given a task related to the use of tools. The situation was similar to Köhler's. The child was placed in a crib with a net, a fetus was in his field of vision, and there were several sticks nearby. The child must reach the fruit, but there is a net in front of him. The task was to bring the fetus closer to you. When the child tries to reach the fruit with his hand, he stumbles upon the net. As Köhler's experience showed, the monkey almost never immediately thought of pushing the fruit in the opposite direction, but first used an immediate reaction, pulling the fruit towards itself. Only when the fruit fell did the monkey resort to a detour to bring it to itself.

A younger child solves a problem with much greater difficulty, with longer delays, and displays very interesting behavior. Usually the child is extremely excited and at the same time exhibits egocentric speech, that is, he not only puffs and changes sticks, but also talks incessantly. By speaking, he performs two functions: on the one hand, he acts and addresses those present, and on the other - and most importantly - the child plans individual parts of the operation in words. For example, when the experimenter removes the stick so that the child does not see it, and the task is to get the fruit that lies behind the net, which can only be done with the help of a stick. The child cannot push his hand further because the mesh is in the way. He must move the fruit from the side, then go around the mesh and plan two stages of the operation - direct the fruit that needs to be reached, run and pick it up. The following moment is especially interesting here: if there is no stick at all, then the child tries to reach the fruit with his hand, walks around the crib, looks around in confusion, but as soon as his attention is directed to the stick, a sharp change in the situation occurs, as if the child knows what to do and the task solved immediately.

In an older child, the same operation proceeds differently. First, the child turns to adults with a request for a stick in order to push the fruit a little: the child turns to words as a means of thinking, as a means that allows, with the help of adults, to get out of a difficult situation. Then the child begins to reason for himself, and reasoning often results in new uniform: the child first says what needs to be done, then does it. He says: “Now I need a stick” or: “Now I’ll get a stick.” It turns out to be a completely new phenomenon. Previously, if there was a stick, the operation was successful, if there was no stick, the operation was unsuccessful. Now the child himself is looking for a stick, and if it is not there, then he himself, judging by the words spoken, is looking for the desired object.

The most interesting thing happens, however, in the experiment with imitation.

While the older child solves the problem, the younger one watches. When the older child has solved the problem, the younger one takes on the solution, and we monitor how well youngest child knows how to imitate and reproduce ready-made solution. It turns out that if the operation is somewhat complex, the situation changes: here the process of imitation consists in the fact that when one child acts, the other performs the operation in words. If he managed to formalize the solution in words, then the solution obtained is that of Lipmann, who asked the subjects to first speak in words, and then begin the process of imitation itself. Naturally, in a more or less complex task, the process of imitation depends on how much the child separated the essential from the unimportant in the operation.

Here's an example. In the most simple case The older child, whom the younger one imitates, reaches through the net and tries to reach the fruit with his hand before solving the problem. After a futile attempt, he takes out a stick and thus opens the way to solving the problem. The younger child, having grasped the whole situation, imitating the older one, begins where the older child ends:

he lies down, reaches out with his hand, but knows in advance that it is impossible to reach the fruit with his hand. Then he reproduces step by step the entire operation performed by the elder. The situation changes significantly as soon as the younger one understands what is going on. Then he reproduces in the situation only what he formalized in words. He says: “We need to get it from that side”; “You need to stand on a chair.” However, here the child does not reproduce the entire visual situation, but only the one that he decided in words.

When observing two forms of thinking in a child - with the help of a visual situation and with the help of words - we notice the same modification of moments that we previously noticed during the development of speech. First, as a rule, the child acts, then speaks, and his words are, as it were, the result of a practical solution to the problem; At this stage, the child cannot separate in words what happened earlier and what happened later. In an experiment, when a child must choose one or another object, he first chooses and then explains why he chose. If a child chooses from two cups the one that contains a nut, he actually chooses it, not knowing that there is a nut there, but in words the child says: he chose because there is a nut in the cup. In other words, words are only the final part of a practical situation.

Gradually, approximately at the age of 4-5, the child moves to the simultaneous action of speech and thinking; the operation to which the child reacts is extended over time, distributed over several moments; speech appears in the form of egocentric speech, thinking occurs during action;

only later their complete unification is observed. Child says: "I I’ll get a stick,” he goes and gets it. At first, this relationship is still hesitant. Finally, at approximately school age, the child begins to plan the desired action in speech earlier and only after this performs the operation.

In all areas of the child's activity we find the same sequence. This is what happens in drawing. Small child usually draws first, speaks later; at the next stage, the child talks about what he is drawing, first in parts; finally, the last stage is formed: the child first says that he will draw, then draws.

Let us try to briefly imagine the colossal revolution that occurs in a child when he switches to thinking with the help of speech. Here we can draw an analogy with the revolution that occurs when a person first begins to use tools. Regarding the psychology of animals, G. Jennings’s assumptions are very interesting: for each animal it is possible to determine the inventory of its capabilities solely by its organs. Thus, a fish cannot fly under any circumstances, but it can perform swimming movements, which are determined by its organs.

Up to 9 months, a human child completely obeys this rule; you can create an inventory of capabilities for a child based on the structure of his organs. But at 9 months a turning point occurs; from that moment on, the human child leaves the Jennings scheme. As soon as the child for the first time pulls the string tied to the rattle, or pushes one toy to another in order to bring it closer to him, organology loses its former strength, and the child begins to differ in its capabilities from the animal, the nature of the child’s adaptation to the world around him changes decisively. Something similar happens in the sphere of thinking, when a child switches to thinking with the help of speech. It is thanks to such thinking that thought acquires a stable and more or less permanent character.

We know the properties of any simple irritation affecting the eye:

The slightest turn of the eye is enough for the image itself to change. Let us recall the experiment with the so-called sequential image: we look at the blue square, when it is removed, we see a yellow spot on the gray screen. This is a form of the simplest memory - the inertia of irritation. Let's try to move our eyes upward - the square goes up, let's move our eyes to the side - the square moves to the side. Move the screen away and the square moves away; move it closer and it moves closer. The result is a terribly unstable reflection of the world, depending on the distance at which the stimuli act, at what angle and in what way they act on us. Let us imagine, says Jaensch, what would happen to a small child if he were in the grip of eidetic images:

the mother who stands ten steps away from him and the mother who came closer should have grown tenfold in the child's eyes. The size of each object would have to vary significantly. The animal, large and mooing, at a distance of a hundred steps a child should have seen like a fly. This means that if there were no corrective correction for space in relation to each object, then we would have a highly unstable picture of the world.

The second drawback of figurative specific form thinking from a biological point of view is that the solution to a specific single problem relates only to a given current situation; We do not have the opportunity here to make a generalization; the solved problem is not an equation that would allow us to transfer the result of the solution to any problem with other objects.

The development of speech restructures thinking and transforms it into new forms. A child who, when describing a picture, lists individual objects, has not yet reorganized his thinking; However, the most essential fact is that already here a method is created on the basis of which his verbal thinking begins to be built. What a child names individual objects is of the greatest importance from the point of view biological functions his organs. The child begins to dismember the incoherent mass of impressions that have merged into one ball; he isolates and dismembers a block of syncretic impressions, which must be dismembered in order to establish some kind of objective connection between the individual parts. Without thinking in words, the child sees the whole picture, and we have reason to assume that he sees the life situation globally, syncretically. Let us remember how syncretically connected all the child’s impressions are; Let us remember how this fact was reflected in the child’s causal thinking. The word, which separates one object from another, is the only means for isolating and dividing a syncretic connection.

Let us imagine what a complex revolution occurs in the thinking of a child who does not speak words, especially in a deaf-mute child, if from a rather complex combination of things, which he thinks as a whole big picture, he needs to isolate some parts or from a given situation to isolate individual signs items. This is an operation that has been waiting for years to develop.

Now let’s imagine a person who knows the word, or, even better, a child, to whom an adult points his index finger at an object: immediately from the whole mass, from the whole situation, one object or sign stands out and becomes the center of the child’s attention; then the whole situation takes on a new aspect. A separate object is isolated from a whole block of impressions, irritation is concentrated on the dominant, and thus the child for the first time proceeds to dismember the block of impressions into separate parts.

How does it happen and what is the most important change in the development of a child’s thinking under the influence of his speech? We know that the word singles out individual objects, dissects the syncretic relationship, the word analyzes the world,

the word is the first means of analysis; To call an object a word for a child means to single out one from the total mass of active objects. We know how primary concepts appear in children. We say to the child: “Here is a bunny.” The child turns around and sees the object. The question is, how does this affect the development of a child’s thinking? In this act, the child moves from an eidetic, syncretic, visual image, from a certain situation, to finding a concept.

As research shows, the development of concepts in a child occurs under the influence of words, but it would be a mistake to think that this is the only way. This is what we thought until recently, but experience with eidetics showed that concepts can also be formed in a different, “natural” way.

In the formation of concepts there are two lines of development, and in the field of natural functions there is something that corresponds to that cultural complex function of behavior, which is called the verbal concept.

E. Jaensch gave the subject a task: he showed some leaf with smooth edges, then immediately showed a row of leaves with jagged edges. In other words, he showed eight to ten objects that had a lot in common in structure, but there were also leaves with individual differences: for example, one leaf had one tooth, another had two or three teeth. Then, when a series of these objects passed in front of the subject, a gray screen was placed in front of him and they watched what image the subject would have. It turned out that sometimes he had a mixed image, such as that obtained during collective photography (at one time, psychologists compared the process of concept formation with the process of collective photography).

At first the child does not have a general concept, he sees one dog, then another, then a third, a fourth, it turns out the same as in a group photograph; what is different in dogs is erased, but what is common remains. What remains is the most characteristic things, such as barking and the shape of the body. Consequently, one might think that a concept is formed in a child simply through the repetition of the same group of images, and one part of the characteristics that are often repeated remains, while others are erased.

This is not confirmed by experimental studies. Observations of a child show that there is no need for him to see, say, 20 dogs in order for him to form a primary concept of a dog. And vice versa: the child can see 100 various types object, but from everything he sees he will not get the desired idea. Obviously, the concept is formed in some other way. In Jaensch we see an attempt to test experimentally what would happen if we showed a series of coherent objects, for example leaves with different teeth. Does this involve a collective photograph or a collective image? It turns out not. In this experiment, three main forms of natural concept formation are obtained.

The first form produces a so-called moving image. The child first sees one leaf, then the leaf begins to jagged, one tooth is formed, then a second, a third, this image returns to the first impression. A dynamic scheme is formed, real irritations transform into one another, a leaf in motion is obtained, which unites everything that was previously stable. Jaensch calls another form of combining an image a meaningful composition: from two or three images that were before our eyes, a new image is obtained; it is not a simple sum of two or three impressions, but a meaningful selection of parts; some parts are selected, others remain, while new images arise, the whole is the result of a meaningful composition.

Eh, Jaensch gave the eidetics a drawing of a dachshund and then, by projection through a magic lantern onto the same screen, gave an image of a donkey; As a result, from two images of different animals, the subjects received the image of a tall hunting dog. Some features coincided, some were taken from one and another image, new features were added, resulting in a transformation into a new image. We will not touch upon the third form of formation of a natural concept in detail.

Experiments have shown that, firstly, concepts are not formed in a purely mechanical way, that our brain does not make collective photographs in such a way that the image of a dog, for example, is superimposed on another image of a dog and as a result a certain result is obtained in the form of a “collective dog”, that the concept is formed by processing images by the child himself.

Thus, even in in kind thinking, a concept is not formed from a simple displacement of individual features that are most often repeated; a concept is formed through a complex modification of what happens when an image is transformed into a moment of movement or a moment of meaningful composition, that is, the selection of some significant features; all this does not happen by simply mixing elements of individual images.

If concepts were formed mechanically by superimposing one stimulus on another, then every animal would have a concept, because the concept would be a Galtonian plate. However, even a mentally retarded child differs from animals in the formation of concepts. All studies show, however, that in mentally retarded children general concepts are formed differently; The formation of a general concept is precisely what is most difficult to develop in mentally retarded children. The most striking features in which the thinking of a mentally retarded child differs from the thinking of a normal child will lie in the fact that a mentally retarded child does not firmly master thinking through the formation of complex concepts.

Let's take a simple example. A mentally retarded child I was dealing with was solving an arithmetic problem. Like many retarded children, he has a good command of simple counting: he performs simple operations in the range from 1 to 10, knows how to add, subtract, and can answer verbally. He remembers that he left the city where he lives on Thursday, the 13th; remembers what time it was. This phenomenon is often found in mentally retarded children: they have a highly developed mechanical memory associated with certain circumstances.

With this child we move on to problem solving. He knows: if you subtract 6 from 10, what remains is 4. He repeats this in the same situation. Then I changed the situation. If, suppose, you ask him: “There were 10 rubles in the wallet, my mother lost 6 rubles, how much is left?” - the child does not solve the problem. If you bring coins and force 6 to be subtracted from 10, he quickly grasps what is happening and decides that 4 coins will remain; When we gave the child such a problem with my wallet, he solves it. But when the same child is given a problem with bottles: “There were 10 glasses in the bottle, you drank 6, how many are left?” - he cannot solve it. If you bring a bottle, show it, pour it into glasses, do the whole operation, the child solves the problem again and then can already solve a similar problem with a bathtub and with any liquid. But it’s worth asking him: “If you subtract 6 arshins from 10 arshins of cloth, how much will remain?” - he again does not solve the problem.

This means that here we have almost the same stage that some animals have with developed so-called arithmetic pseudo-concepts, when there are no abstract concepts, that is, those that do not depend on a specific situation (bottles, coins) and, due to their abstractness, become general concepts, applicable to all occasions in life, to every task.

Now we see to what extent a mentally retarded child is a slave to a specific situation, to what extent his adaptation is reduced. He does not have the apparatus for developing a general concept, and therefore he knows how to adapt only within a narrow situation. We see how difficult it is for him to adapt where a normal child, having once learned that 10-6 = 4, will always solve the problem this way, regardless of the specific situation.

And the last example is of a mentally retarded child who is taught with the help of a plan to walk a rather difficult distance in Berlin. The child gradually masters this plan and walks correctly along the learned path. Suddenly the child got lost. It turned out that the house on the corner, near which he had to turn onto another street and which was marked with a cross in the plan, had been taken into the scaffolding for repairs. The whole situation has changed. The child was lost, he was not used to returning alone, so he went wandering and fell into the power of random irritations, which began to amuse him.

This example clearly shows to what extent it is true and indisputable that if a mentally retarded child does not have an apparatus for developing abstract concepts, then he is extremely limited in adaptation. He becomes extremely limited in this regard when his apparatus for the development of concepts falls under the power of specific thinking and a specific situation.

Speech develops following the development of thinking. Thinking and speech consultation on speech development (preparatory group) on the topic

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