15.7 The best theory: Thought is independent of language
15.7 The best theory: Thought is independent of language
15.7.1Thought is independent of language
The relationship between language and thought that will be proposed here is essentially the one that was advocated by the philosopher John Locke some three centuries ago. It is that thought is independent of language, that language is dependent on thought, and that the function of language is to provide a means for the expression and communication of thought.
The thought system in the mind of the child develops over time as input stimuli of the world, such as visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli represent- ing objects, events, and situations in the environment, are experienced by the child. Until thought is sufficiently developed (ideas of objects, relations of objects, states and actions of objects), words uttered in the presence of the child are not meaningfully processed. When that happens and when language input is experienced in coordination with objects, events, and situations, then language can begin to be learned. Over a period of time, the language system, with its vocabulary and grammatical rules, is formed.
Part of the language system is actually part of the thought system, for the meaning and semantics of the language system are those ideas that are part of the content of thought. There is not one idea for ‘dog’ in language and another in thought. Such a view would be unparsimonious in the extreme. Rather, the thought and language systems are joined through meaning and ideas.
15.7.1The development of thought precedes the development of language
As thought develops, the child seeks to express those thoughts to others. Through speech understanding the child develops a grammar and finds a means through speech production to provide meaningful speech (see Chapter 1). The grammar develops as the result of prior thought. Thus, the sequence is as follows:
Thought ® Speech understanding ® Speech production
It is with this sequencing of thought, speech understanding, and speech production that we can explain all of the problems that were raised in objection to the four previously described theories. None of the other theor- ies can do this.
15.7.1 The notion of ‘thinking in language’ is a fallacy
It is often observed that sound forms of words come to one’s awareness while one is thinking. It is a mistake, however, to conclude from this that the sound forms themselves are thought. Such word forms are merely re- flections of some underlying ideas. It is thought that determines the selection of word forms. As children, we learn to encode thoughts into language and then into acoustic speech. Because we discover that in order to interact effectively with people, we must be instantly ready to express our thoughts into speech, we consequently develop a habit of converting thoughts into speech at a mental level. It is this mental sound form that we sometimes become aware of when we think. The connections from particular thought to mental language and then physical speech are mainly automatic and it is
only with conscious effort (our normal condition) that we do not say every- thing that we think. When a child first learns to speak, it seems that the child does not have suppression control and that much of what he or she thinks is articulated into speech. What the child must and soon does learn is that while it is all right to automatically convert all thoughts to sentences in the mind, it is not all right to convert all of those sentences to overt speech. Socially unpleasant consequences result for those who do.
15.7.1John Locke said it best
Concerning the relation of language and thought, in our view John Locke said it best:
The Comfort and Advantage of Society, not being to be had without Commun- ication of Thoughts, it was necessary, that Man should find out some external visible Signs, whereof those invisible Ideas, which his Thoughts are made up of, might be made known to others.
(Locke, 1690: Book III, ch. ii, sect. 1)