Lev Vygotsky
Thinking and Speech

In the last years of his life, Vygotsky paid most of his attention to the study of the relationship between thought and word in the structure of consciousness. This problem was explored in Vygotsky's book, Thinking and Speech, that was published posthumously in 1934. The book was a collection of essays and scholarly papers that Vygotsky wrote during different periods of his thought development. It was edited by his closest associates Kolbanovskii, Zankov, and Shif. The book established the connection between speech and the development of mental concepts and awareness. Vygotsky described silent inner speech as being qualitatively different from verbal external speech, but both equally important. Vygotsky believed inner speech developed from external speech via a gradual process of "internalization" (i.e., transition from the external to the internal), with younger children only really able to "think out loud". He claimed that in its mature form, inner speech would not resemble spoken language as we know it (in particular, being greatly compressed). Hence, thought itself developed socially.

Inner speech, according to Vygotsky, develops through the accumulation of long-term functional and structural changes. It branches off from the child's external speech along with the differentiation of the social and egocentric functions of speech, and, finally, the speech functions acquired by the child become the main functions of his thinking.

In this work, Vygotsky points out the genesis of the development of thinking and speech and that the relationship between them is not a constant value.

But since we wanted to express all this in one short formula, in one sentence, we might put it thus: if at the beginning of development there stands the act, independent of the word, then at the end of it there stands the word which becomes the act, the word which makes man's action free.
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