Thought and language

What thinking person has not wondered about the relationship between thought and language? When we express a thought in language, do we start with a fully formed idea and then “translate” it into a string of words? Or is the thought not fully formed until the string of words is assembled?

On one hand, language is a form of symbolic communication that allows us to shape our understanding of reality and of ourselves. But on the other hand, one does not need the crutch of a language to experience emotions and feelings. Multiple theories exist to support each argument.

THOUGHT BEFORE LANGUAGE:

“My language to describe things in the world is very small, limited. My thoughts when I look at the world are vast, limitless, and normal, the same as they ever were. My experience of the world is not made less by lack of language but is essentially unchanged.” - Tom Lubbock. Language puts labels on thoughts that we have and language wouldn’t have come about in the first place if we didn’t have any thoughts to verbalize, to begin with. There are three basic components involved in any kind of verbal activity and those are, conceptualization, the action or process of forming a concept or idea of something, and then comes formulation, the component in which the content is mapped into linguistic form and lastly, articulation, the formation of clear and distinct sounds in speech. The idea that thought is the basis for language is further seen in the way language and thought develop in infants. Studies show that even though the language is absent in infants and babies, disjunctive syllogism: (A or B; if not A, therefore B) seems to be active. This goes to show us that even without the knowledge of the basic language, babies do have a thought process that goes on to determine the language in later life. Or in the words of psychologist John Hoopkins, “I think many people would say that most of their reasoning happens when they are silently talking to themselves in their heads. What this new study reveals is that preverbal infants are also working through this same type of serial reasoning, and doing so before robust language abilities have been mastered.” All this evidence shows that language perhaps is not entirely necessary to shape the brain’s logical reasoning capacities and thought, in general.

LANGUAGE BEFORE THOUGHT: