Through Psychology | The Role of Speech (I) - Literary Review
In this series of articles, I will analyse Alexander Luria's book The Role of Speech in the Regulation of Normal and Abnormal Behaviour, published in 1961.
First, let me share some of Luria's words on the Foreword.
He states that this book is an analysis of the development of the verbal system's regulatory role in the ontogenesis [individual evolution] and its disruption under various pathological brain conditions.
Luria will then start by talking about the children expected speech development and which functions it serves during some important stages.
“The role of verbal communication in the organization of complex parts of the behaviour has become a model in the light of which the formation of the most complex aspects of the psychic activity can be traced with particular clarity.”
On the first chapter, The Role of Speech in the Formation of Mental Processes, the author states that one of psychology achievements was the study of the origin of mental processes.
The basic principle of the Soviet psychology is the idea that mental activities – intelligent perception, intentional memory, active attention and deliberate action – are a result of a long evolution in the child’s current behaviour.
So the fact that a child’s mental activity is conditioned from the beginning by her social relationships with adults is of basic significance.
Human experience is passed on to the child by adults and mastering this experience – in which process the child acquires new knowledge and new ways of behaviour – becomes the main form of mental development unknown in animals.
The works of Vygotsky are based on the idea that all the most important mental activities result from the child’s social development, when new functional systems arise.
The child remains socially bound with her mother for a long time. She is linked to her at first directly and emotionally, and later through speech; in this sense, she increases her experience and acquires new ways of behaviour, and then new ways of organizing her mental activity.
By naming several close objects and giving the child orders and instructions, her mother is modelling her behaviour - on this check my own thoughts at Making the Most of your Brain.
After gaining the ability of speech, and having carefully observed the objects named by her mother, the child begins to name them actively and to organize her own acts of perception and deliberate attention.
Therefore she learns how to formulate her own wishes and intentions independently, first in externalized speech and then in internalized speech. Then, she will create higher forms of intentional memory and deliberate activity.
All these complex mental activities are at first done by means of externalized audible speech; later, they gradually become the main forms of the child’s mental activity.
Many psychologists neglect the social origin of these mental processes and fall to interpret such psychological phenomena as being “intrinsic properties of mental life”.
It is essential to reach an appropriate definition of the nature of higher psychological functions, and make a careful research of the complex processes through which the relationships that a child accomplishes by means of speech lead to the formation of complicated behaviour patterns.
To use Vygotsky’s terminology, it is important to study the process in which functions previously shared between two people gradually change into the complex functional structures in the mind that forms the essence of human higher mental activity.
Stay tuned for more!
Reference: Luria, A. R. (1961). The Role of Speech in the Regulation of Normal and Abnormal Behavior. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.
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