What comes fist? : thought or language


What can we say comes first: language or thoyght. Through time, many scientists and researchers from the topic have been interested in this question, and they have formulated what they thought was the right answer. The followin statements are from a few of this scientists.


 "Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about objects," says Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. "These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later." It's like the chicken and egg question. Do we learn to think before we speak, or does language shape our thoughts? New experiments with five-month-olds favor the conclusion that thought comes first.

Speakers of different languages notice different things and so make different distinctions. For example, when Koreans say that one object joins another, they specify whether the objects touch tightly or loosely. English speakers, in contrast, say whether one object is in or on another. Saying "I put the spoon cup" is not correct in either language. The spoon has to be "in" or "on" the cup in English, and has to be held tightly or loosely by the cup in Korean.

As Lev Vygotsky states, “the structure of speech is not simply the mirror image of the structure of thought. It cannot therefore be placed on thought like clothes off a rack. Speech does not merely serve as the expression of developed thought. Thought is restructured as it is transformed into speech. It is not expressed but completed in the word. Therefore, precisely because of the contrasting directions of the movement, the development of the internal and external aspects of speech form a true unity.” The picture that Vygotsky is painting here is that of language combining with conscious activity to form a unity. There is no casual relation to be explained between the thought had and the word formed; rather, meaningful expressions are a result of conscious processes operating upon a linguistic medium. The two are conceptually dependent, and idea that is vigorously argued for in Wittegnstein’s famous “private language argument” and given similar expression by Vygotsky’s account of language acquisition in childhood.

 

Saussure draws a distinction between language (langue) and the activity of speaking (parole). Speaking is an activity of the individual; language is the social manifestation of speech. Language is a system of signs that evolves from the activity of speech.
Language is a link between thought and sound, and is a means for thought to be expressed as sound. Thoughts have to become ordered, and sounds have to be articulated, for language to occur. Saussure says that language is really a borderland between thought and sound, where thought and sound combine to provide communication.
Spoken language includes the communication of concepts by means of sound-images from the speaker to the listener. Language is a product of the speaker’s communication of signs to the listener. Saussure says that a linguistic sign is a combination of a concept and a sound-image. The concept is what is signified, and the sound-image is the signifier. The combination of the signifier and the signified is arbitrary; i.e., any sound-image can conceivably be used to signify a particular concept.
A sign can be altered by a change in the relationship between the signifier and the signified. According to Saussure, changes in linguistic signs originate in changes in the social activity of speech.