Lecture 8. The role of conversation in the development of higher mental functions.

As a Marxist psychologist, Vygotsky (1930-1935/1978, p.7) considered individual development to be rooted in society, culture, and history. His decision to focus on speech activity as the critical link between individual development and social history was a stroke of genius. Vygotsky recognized in human speech communication the special combination of qualities needed to explain the development of higher thought processes in children. For instance, the words and grammar of a language are tools invented in ancient times and handed down to us through countless generations. So is the human voice, with its capacity for producing articulate speech sounds. Spoken words and sentences are also material objects that have the capacity to serve as vehicles for conveying concepts and ideas. In the context of communication, speaking is a social and cultural activity in which participants maintain eye contact, alternate listening and speaking turns, and observe cultural conventions about sharing information. Conversing also requires participants to engage in various cognitive activities, such as listening and speaking. Communicating through speech necessarily involves higher psychological functions when conversation is aimed at solving a difficult problem or formulating and executing a plan of action. As if this were not enough, Vygotsky also recognized that a child could transfer to her own individual activity the social, cultural, and cognitive functions of speech that arise in conversation with others. By conversing with herself instead of another person, a child creates the conditions enabling her to coordinate speaking and listening roles, and to imagine and adopt another person’s perspective. Thus, individual development of higher psychological functions could plausibly be explained in terms of a child’s appropriation of the social process of thinking collectively by means of talking collectively. Convergence of speaking and thinking One of Vygotsky’s core concepts regarding the social roots of higher psychological functions is the convergence of speaking and thinking. According to Vygotsky, there is a very early stage in child development in which thinking and verbalizing are distinctly separate activities. This initial period of pre-verbal intelligence and pre-intellectual verbalization occurs in infancy and persists until an infant formulates her first words. “The most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge” (Vygotsky, 1930-1935/1978, p.24). Uttering a word and performing a symbolic intellectual act become one and the same psychological function. To be more accurate, the unity of word and intellect is a socially organized psychological function, since words are only meaningful in the context of speech communication with others. Vygotsky (1934/1987, p.49) conceived of this convergence as a “unity of generalization and social interaction, a unity of thinking and communication.” The significance of this convergence to a child’s development is that speaking becomes intelligent, and thinking becomes verbal. Vygotsky (1934/1962, p.7; 1934/1987, pp.244-245) called this wedding of word and thinking “word meaning.” Word meaning is not fixed and static. It is best described as a relation or movement between thinking and communicating in words (Vygotsky, 1934/1987, p.250). Thinking, which for the young child begins as practical intelligence, is an “internal” activity—a neurological process—conducted inside the child’s head, whereas communicating in words is a social activity—an interpersonal process—that is “external” to the child and historically precedes her. Although together they form a unity, “the inner, meaningful, semantic aspect of speech is associated with different laws of movement than its external, auditory aspect” (p.250). According to Vygotsky (1934/1987, p.251), word meaning is initially an unconscious fusion of word and thought. For word meanings to develop and become fully comprehended, a child must consciously differentiate the semantic aspect from the vocal aspect at each step (Vygotsky, 1934/1987, p.253). For example, a child must initially pay attention to the opposing movements between the structure and function of a word. From a structural perspective, speech development proceeds from single words to complete sentences—that is, from part to whole. But from a functional perspective, development proceeds from complete thoughts (as contained in a whole sentence) to differentiated speech functions (i.e., parts of speech, or function words)—that is, from whole to part. These opposing movements between form and function require a child’s active involvement in the formation and restructuring of word meaning. “The structure of speech does not simply mirror the structure of thought. Thought undergoes many changes as it turns into speech. It does not merely find expression in speech; it finds its reality and form. The semantic and the phonetic developmental processes are essentially one, precisely because of their reverse directions” (Vygotsky, 1934/1962, p.126). Word meaning develops further as a child takes increasingly into consideration different layers of context. Soon after word meaning is formed amid the tension between the phonetic and semantic aspects of a spoken word, grammatical context is brought to bear, such that word meaning is revised as a result of the push and pull between syntactic structures and the logical structures of thought that correspond to these syntactic forms. Eventually, the child takes the discourse context into account, further qualifying her word meaning by her attempts to relate sentences uttered sequentially in conversation to the corresponding “topical” information in her conscious awareness, information Vygotsky (1934/1987, p.250-252) referred to as the “psychological” subject or predicate. Although Vygotsky did not have access to the analytical concepts and procedures that have recently been developed in the field of discourse analysis (see Stubbs, 1983), he clearly was thinking along “conversational” lines when he wrote about the lack of correspondence that can arise in different social situations between grammatical and psychological subjects and predicates. Initially, development of a child’s word meaning occurs in the familiar mode of speech activity that Vygotsky (1934/1987, pp.75-76) called “interpersonal,” or “external” speech. This is speech that is conducted in collaboration with others. Interpersonal speech is physically and mentally “externalized” because, when the child speaks, the word physically issues from the child’s mouth and travels outward to another person’s ear, and is mentally intended for the other person to hear. Interpersonal speech constitutes one of several “planes” of speech activity in which thought and word are combined to produce word meaning. In the context of interpersonal speech with adults, it is important to note that as soon as a child utters her first word, adults begin to induct her into the world of conversation by interpreting her word meaning for her. Adults typically respond to a child’s one-word utterance as a turn at talk that expresses a message and an intention (Dore, 1979, p.349). This multifaceted response helps the child to define her word meaning in terms of its particular communicative functions in the shared activity and the shared topic of conversation, while it also helps her to define her social role as a participant and contributing member of the group. As she becomes more proficient with word meanings and grammar, a child becomes capable of participating more fully in activities and conversations that involve higher psychological functions, such as planning and problem-solving. Being able to participate in discussions aimed at planning solutions to problems requires a good deal of facility with words, clauses, and sentences, as well as sophisticated use of various types of conversational exchanges with others, such as question/answer/comment exchanges. Descriptions, evaluations, mental simulations, and hypotheses verbalized by group members in the course of activity have to be coherently organized through conversation. For a young child to individually master such a complex linguistic and intellectual task as planning with words, she must develop sufficient verbal skill to negotiate not only her own role, but the roles of all the other participants as well. The mastery of others’ conversational roles in addition to one’s own is necessary whenever the development of a topic of conversation (such as a complex idea or activity) requires many turns at talk. Psychologically, an essential component of this mastery of conversation is the cognitive skill of mentally switching roles between that of speaker and listener—that is, a child must be able to imagine another person’s perspective in order to adopt that point of view in conversation. Ironically, this uniquely human ability to coordinate listening with speaking—a requirement for communicative competence—cannot be learned from interpersonal speech alone. Participation in interpersonal speech limits a child either to the act of speaking during her turn at talk, or to the act of listening to others talk during her turn to listen. In interpersonal speech, there is no possibility of listening to one’s own utterance and experiencing one’s own words as listeners do. For that to occur, a child needs to radically transform her individual speech activity. To verify Vygotsky’s (1934/1962; 1930-1935/1978; 1934/1987) claims about the development of the structures and functions of private speech, it is essential that discourse analysis be among the analytical tools that researchers use. Vygotsky devoted careful thought to the methods and units of analysis he employed in developing his theory of higher psychological processes. He recognized the pitfalls of analyzing psychological phenomena as objects instead of processes, and of choosing “elements” as opposed to “units” as the fundamental particles of analysis. By element, Vygotsky (1934/1962, p.3) was referring to a part that does not contain the integral properties of the phenomenon as a whole. For example, the analysis of water into its constituent elements of hydrogen and oxygen, he argued, precludes study of its essential properties—i.e., its wetness, its capacity to extinguish fire, etc. But analysis of water into its constituent units—i.e., water molecules—does permit study of its qualities. Similarly, Vygotsky sought the unit of analysis that is appropriate to the study of speaking and thinking, a unit capable of capturing their interaction at any point in development. His choice was word meaning. As discussed earlier, word meaning is not fixed, but changes developmentally. One of the critical factors shaping the development of word meaning is context. Vygotsky (1934/1962) proposed that if one defines the “sense” of a word as the sum of all the psychological events aroused in one’s consciousness by the use of the word, then context provides word meaning with “sense.” A word meaning acquires its sense from the context in which it appears; in different contexts, it changes its sense. “This enrichment of words by the sense they gain from the context is the fundamental law of the dynamics of word meanings. A word in a context means both more and less than the same word in isolation: more, because it acquires new content; less, because its meaning is limited and narrowed by the context” (Vygotsky, 1934/1962, p.146). Because conversation plays a key organizing role in speech activity, it becomes a key contextual factor in the analysis of word meaning. For example, when determining the meaning of a child’s use of a word in a single utterance of private speech, it is critical to know whether the utterance is part of a conversational exchange (e.g., a question/answer/comment exchange) or conversationally isolated. And to make this determination, the analysis must draw upon all the properties of spoken language in context—syntax, semantics, pragmatics, intonation, content, conversation, ongoing activity, etc. Discourse analysis (see Stubbs, 1983) is a richly textured method that provides the necessary means to rigorously test Vygotsky’s (1934/1987) claims about interpersonal and private speech. Labov and Fanshel (1977) developed an excellent example of discourse analysis designed as a series of systematic procedures for evaluating words in different contexts. In their analysis, the meaning of any single word or phrase can be examined in relation to the contextual layers surrounding it, which include the sentence, the conversation, the therapeutic session, the language spoken within the home, and the language spoken by the community at large. Their method paves the way for socio-historical and socio-cultural analyses of words in context. Another tool for studying the discourse structure of private speech is Dore’s (1977) set of procedures for analyzing conversational “moves,” used in conjunction with his categories for classifying utterance functions (Dore, 1979). His procedures enable researchers to determine if utterances are conversationally connected, and then to classify the conversational function(s) served by each utterance. While the potential benefits of using discourse analysis are very great, so are the risks of not using it when studying private speech. By not construing private speech utterances as dialogical or conversational, we risk distorting and diluting Vygotsky’s conception of the social character of speaking and thinking, and along with it, his conception of all higher psychological processes.