In this article, I'm analysing Alexander Luria's book The Role of Speech in the Regulation of Normal and Abnormal Behavior, published in 1961.
The readjustment of mental processes under the influence of speech and the creation of complicated forms of activity do not happen suddenly; they are products of a long process of development and pass through a series of stages, ending at different points according to the complexity of the functional formations.
A simple case of this readjustment is the modification of the process when forming simple temporary links under the influence of the naming-function of speech.
Experiments on this matter were made in Leningrad by Lyublinskaya: children aged between one to three years old were given small boxes, a green one empty and a red one containing sweets. With no instructions, it was proved very difficult for the children to choose the right box; if a correct choice was made, even after numerous attempts, it was easily extinguished.
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The picture changed completely when speech was brought into the experiment: when the scientist named the colours of the two boxes. The process of establishing a new link was three times as quick as before; once established, it was very difficult to be extinguished; and it was readily transferred to other objects (cups or bricks), which the child began to classify similarly.
However, the way speech enters into the complicated action of generalizing visual stimuli proves far more complex.
Experiments carried out by Ruzskaya in Zaporozhets’s laboratory inMoscow have made it clear how very far speech has to develop before it becomes a real basis for elaborating more complicated visual generalizations.
Explaining the task meticulously and naming the figures as they appeared produced no appreciable effect in small children. Here, adding the figure’s generalizing name did not enter into their perception system. Only in children aged from five to seven a striking modification was observed; with this group, speech began to play a real generalizing part.
Does this mean that these age-limits are irreducible and that forming generalized perception by means of speech is out of question earlier?
Ruzskaya shows that forming complicated perceptions is possible even in children aged three or four. It can be done if the child has previously been trained in the development of successive orienting actions.
If before the basic experiment the child had taken hold of the object in question, felt its contours, counted its angles, and named it accordingly, the results changed considerably.
Around 1930, Vygotsky carried out an experiment that had a profound influence on the subsequent works of the Soviet psychologists:
He asked children under 8 years old to do a simple practical task, such as drawing or outlining a picture, and then made the task more complicated: the child would find there was no pencil to draw with or no drawing-pins to hold down the tracing paper.
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The very youngest proved helpless, they could not get over the difficulty and usually appealed to an adult for help and they did nothing until such help was given.
Children aged five to seven, if given no help, tried to find a way out of the difficulty, but the difficulty intensified their orientation to their surroundings and evoked an outburst of active speech, the difficulty had caused a tremendous intensification in the child’s “egocentric speech”.
This violent outburst of speech performed a practical function and was of great help to the child in finding a way out of the difficulty. It was a kind of verbal orientation to the surroundings, reflecting the surrounding objects and checking the possibilities of using them to find a way out; then, it began to spread beyond the limits of the immediate situation, in such way that several systematized and generalized signs of the child’s previous experience appeared in her “egocentric speech”.
Some time later, especially in children aged six or seven, the investigator begins to observe the disappearance of the unattached unfocused speech. As a matter of fact, the child’s externalized speech appears only in the form of reduced and disconnected links; it gradually passes over into the abbreviated internal speech which is part of the thought process.
Numerous other investigations have shown this process to be characteristic of the development of almost all the higher forms of mental activity. These systems are socially generated.
Minskaya asked children to do various tasks connected with the physical manipulation of levers, and she demonstrated that children of three to five can operate a simple system of levers successfully.
However, when the same task was presented as an image and the practical tests were excluded, the child was totally unable to do the task.
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The whole picture can be changed if we first train the child in the development of orienting actions accompanied by speech relationships. So, then, the child was asked to do the task together with the experimenter or an older child.
As a result, the child could increase her orientation activities and incorporate her own speech into the process of performing the task required; she achieved this by means of her relationship with the adult.
Vygotsky had suggested that when assessing a child’s intellectual abilities, she should be asked to perform the required tasks twice: to compare her degree of success in doing them on her own or with an adult help.
Vygotsky called this method of inquiry “the investigation of the child’s zone of potential development”. Children with varying potentialities will show up clearly during such an investigation.
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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