Inner Speech

Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget were famously intrigued by childish babble. Upon hearing a two-year-old talk to no one in particular using fractured language all but incomprehensible for all practical purposes, they thought very differently about this babble.

Piaget called it that, babble, musical accompaniment, the expending of excess energy, essentially disconnected from cognition. Vygotsky called it private speech, speech to self, self-regulatory, tightly connected to cognition especially during perplexity. The child expresses thought through the mouth, having not yet developed inner speech.

Research in the phenomenon of private speech in the Vygotskian tradition has fully documented a rise in frequency of occurrences of private speech during early childhood especially when children run into a problem—a piece of a puzzle that won’t quite fit, a toy that won’t quite work. It crescendoes until children reach school age and then dissolves into silence, into what Vygotsky called “inner speech.”¹

This sort of speech links thought and language in a way distinctly human in that primates can and do use language to communicate outwardly, but not to think in a time-binding manner. Moreover, inner speech is a pared down version of outer language: “Inner speech works with semantics, not phonetics,” he wrote. “The specific semantic structure of inner speech…contributes to abbreviation” (Vygotsky, p. 210). As private speech matures into inner speech, “…its main characteristic trait is its peculiar syntax. Compared with external speech, inner speech appears disconnected and incomplete. …[I]nner speech must be regarded, not as speech minus sound, but as an entirely separate speech function” [emphasis added] (p. 235).

This separate inner speech function links thinking and speech, cognition and language, as task and tool are linked, inseparable in the act of doing things inside the skull; the other, entirely separate speech function links speaker and listener. Deep cognition of the sort engaged when we keep our mouths shut and just think in silence alone is fueled by words.

In my view, it makes sense that language to communicate must have guard rails to have an even chance of preventing confusing pile-ups, there must be conventions, shared structures and protocols to assure a joint focus of attention on a message, when it is used to transmit and receive messages between one consciousness and another. It’s hard enough to be conscious, let alone communicate that consciousness.

Vygotsky saw a theoretical problem in the dominant method of analysis psychologists of his time applied to the problem of thinking and meaning, a method which obscured the existence of inner speech as a tool of verbal thought and looked just at social speech as a tool of communication:

“Psychology, which aims at a study of complex holistic systems, must replace the method of analysis into elements with the method of analysis into units. What is the unit of verbal thought that is further unanalyzeable and yet retains the properties of the whole? We believe that such a unit can be found in the internal aspect of the word, in word meaning [emphasis in original]. …Word meaning has been lost in the ocean of all other aspects of consciousness, in the same way as phonetic properties detached from meaning have been lost among the other characteristics of vocalization (Vygotsky, p.5)

If one embraces the word as the core engine powering cognition as a generator of consciousness: “The meaning of a word represents such a close amalgam of thought and language that it is hard to tell whether it is a phenomenon of speech or a phenomenon of thought” (Vygotsky, p. 212). Korzybski, of course, who shared historical time with Vygotsky, linked the meaning of a word not just to the mind, but to the body, with his concept called the semantic reactor.

Korzybski famously brought a tin of biscuits one day to a class he was teaching, sat down, and ate a biscuit. Evidently noticing signs of an appetite among his students, he passed the tin around and shared them, with some students enjoying them and eating more than one. After everyone had finished their snacks, Korzybski casually mentioned something about how tasty the dog biscuits had been (shit-brown carpets), and some students vomited.

I have no idea if Vygotsky was aware of Korzybski’s work, but Vygotsky clearly shared concerns about the ramifications of viewing language as just another machine in the tool shed of this creature that can make planes that fly, yet send young men to their deaths in war.

Seeing word meanings as simple associations between “…a word’s sound and its content…handicaps both linguistics and psychology. …It is not merely the content of a word that changes, but the way reality is generalized and reflected in the word” (Vygotsky, p. 213).

Piaget and Vygotsky agreed on one point at least: Cognition is activity of the mind evoked by contact between a sentient creature and reality. Where they differed is in their assessment of the role of language as either a huge warehouse for storing the machinery of words and rules or as a critical tool in shaping cognition at the event level—Vygotsky saw a dual function for language.

I have a strong memory of the impact Vygotsky’s last paragraph in Thought and Language had on me in the early 1990s when I read the book in a seminar taught by Dr. Murphy in my doctoral program. His metaphor of the atom reminded me of the semantic reactor as S. I. Hayakawa had depicted it in his diagram for his textbook for use in General Semantics courses—an atom surrounded in arcs of emic power. Here is Vygotsky’s final paragraph again:

“Consciousness is reflected in a word as the sun in a drop of water. A word relates to consciousness as a living cell relates to a whole organism, as an atom relates to the universe. A word is a microcosm of human consciousness” (Vygotsky, p. 256).

1. Vygotsky, L. (1978, 1992) newly revised and edited by Alex Kozulin. Thought and Language. Massachusetts Institute of Technology