Through Psychology | The Role of Speech (II) - Literary Review
In this series of articles, I'm analysing Alexander Luria's book The Role of Speech in the Regulation of Normal and Abnormal Behaviour, published in 1961.
A vital feature of the complicated functional systems is that they enable man to go far beyond the limits of his physical capacities and organize the forms of active deliberate behaviour whose description has always perplexed psychologists.
When a mother shows a child something and says “cup”, her pointing and the name of the object cause a crucial modification in the child’s perception.
The word designating the object defines its essential functional properties and sets it within the category of other objects with similar properties.
It is obvious to any observer that a child not only watches her mother’s index finger but soon begins to use her own to mark objects from the environment; besides perceiving the words she hears, the child soon begins actively naming objects. This is what becomes the main factor in her further mental development.
So she becomes able of actively modifying the environment that influences her; by using speech for herself, she changes the strength of the stimuli acting upon her, and adapts her behaviour to the modified influences.
The experiments shared by Luria show that speaking to a child can in fact re-shape her perception of a stimulus and modify the “rule of force” by making the physically weaker component more dominate:
Firstly, children three to five years old were showed different coloured circles on different coloured backgrounds, and they were told to squeeze a balloon with their right hand when the red circle on the grey ground appeared and with the left hand when the green circle on the yellow ground appeared.
image taken from the book itself
This simple instruction showed that children are focused on the stimulus with greater force: the circle. So, they squeezed the balloon according to the circle and not the background: they would still squeeze the balloon with their right hand even if the red circle appeared on the yellow ground.
Then, the circles were replaced by coloured aeroplanes and the first instruction was kept. But now the scientists told the children to squeeze the balloon with their right hand when the red aeroplane on the yellow ground appeared “because the plane can fly when the sun is shining and the sky is yellow”; and with their left hand to squeeze when the green aeroplane on the grey ground appeared “because when it’s raining the plane can’t fly and has to be stopped”.
With these two different instructions, the coloured backgrounds also gained the strength of first signals and in an overwhelming majority of cases even children of three or four began reacting to the backgrounds instead of the figures only.
As the experiments carried out have shown, the natural strength of an object can be easily modified by influencing the subject in a verbal way. The pictures change radically if we use verbal instructions that give a special property to a weak stimulus.
It is only in serious pathological cases, such as in oligophrenics*, that a system of speech associations fails to influence the perception process or to ensure a stable rearrangement of the immediate relative strength of the stimuli.
*Note: oligophrenia designates cases of intellectual deficits, usually physical deficits that cause cognitive disruptions.
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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