Formation of the hidden mechanism of internal speech in ontogenesis

The evolution of the discursive thinking of the linguistic personality of the student is based on the formation of the latent (hidden) mechanism of internal speech, the mechanism of transition of thought into text (speech production) and text into thought (speech understanding). The processes of formation and semantic perception of utterances in an adult language personality were considered in the first part of the book. How does the formation of the mechanism of speech-thinking? The answer to this question are the results of experiments conducted in the mid-90s by one of the authors of the manual. We are not able to give all the experiments here, referring the reader to a monograph devoted to the formation of discursive thinking. We describe only some of the experiments on the evolution of the understanding of discourse by schoolchildren.

In classical experiments on memorization and reproduction of texts, which were conducted by Russian psychologists P. I. Zinchenko and A. A. Smirnov, a decrease was observed in high school students of completeness and accuracy in voluntary and involuntary memorization of information. Schoolchildren of different ages were offered to memorize and play a small text. The retellings of tenth-graders were sometimes schematic, approaching in their scope to the retellings of younger students. However, the schematization of the texts of high school students was not determined by the deterioration of the quality of memorization, but by the fact that in their discourses, older adolescents transmitted the original information in recoded, processed form: they sought to reproduce not a form, but a generalized model of the main content of the text.

Our experiments are like a continuation of the experiences of domestic psychologists. They were attended by children of three age groups: 6-7, 10-11 and 15-16 years. The subjects were offered a simple task: to listen to the text and, without much thought, verbally convey its content: Retellings were recorded on a tape recorder with subsequent written transcripts.

The peculiarity of the experiment was that the subjects were offered a deliberately distorted text: at the beginning and at the end of the story the paragraphs were rearranged in such a way that the semantic sequence and logic of presentation were sharply violated.

The experiment used the well-known story of Leo Tolstoy "How Rome saved the geese."

This is how schoolchildren of different ages coped with the retelling. .

6-7 years.

The Gauls climbed to the Kremlin through the walls / plates // And one uncle woke up / and one crash // And all the others fell //

. 10-11 years old

Once the Gauls wanted to attack the Capitol // They were well armed // In three hundred and ninetieth year they attacked Rome // They passed spears to each other // Shuffled through the walls so that no dog could hear // Since then there was a holiday // Smart merchants lead geese to a dog // A goose is bowing / and a dog is beaten until / until it exhales // The last people did not have time to climb over the wall / as the geese yanked and flapped their wings // One Roman woke up // Here the enemy fell and threw down are all // Since then, geese have become the savior of Rome //

15-16 years old

There is such a holiday in Rome / when priests dress in ceremonial clothes / and walk around the city in a system // And one of the priests in front / in the arms of the goose / to whom people give all kinds of honors // And at the end of the system leads the last priest to the dog / which everyone beats since / until she dies // This custom occurred / because in three hundred and ninety years / before Christ was an attack on Rome / 1 The Gauls wanted to seize the Capitol in Rome / in which there were a lot of jewels and riches / and at night they climbed on the walls cities // And nobody saw them / and did not hear // When they were already reached the mountain itself / no dog in the city saw them / and did not smell // And geese / when the Gauls / helping each other from below / and transferring weapons / saw one gall / and made noise // Therefore, people / Romans heard and saw attack of the Gauls // Help came / and the Gauls broke //

We see that younger schoolchildren could not reproduce the speech work given to them: at best, they recalled two or three phrases from the text they heard, Using the “language computer” by children of this age is far from perfect. The six-year-olds with great difficulty are able to formulate a statement out of the situation, they have difficulty in understanding texts of considerable volume.

By adolescence, the picture changes significantly. Children of secondary school age have virtually no difficulty in transmitting the speech work. However as

it is evident from the experiments that they reproduced the contents of the distorted story in the form in which it was read to them, without trying to recode the information received and to create a coherent, coherent text based on it. This suggests that although by the time of adolescence children have already formed an internal speech (which allows them to generate their statements at a sufficiently high speed), it is still unavailable for them to perform complex speech-and-thought operations to analyze the content of a statement (necessary for a deep understanding of the meaning of a speech work).

The ability for such subtle transcoding appears in a language personality only at the senior school age. This is evidenced by the experience of reproducing distorted text. Having received the story as a source of information with a violation of coherence and presentation logic, young people (without prior deliberation, spontaneously) in their retelling gave a coherent (meaningful) coherent text. Having listened to the story read to them, in a few seconds they performed an operation to identify the semantic program, the intention of the text, and then turned it into a complete speech work having an adequate presentation logic.

Another experiment was based on the ability of children to understand a text with an informative-semantic lacuna. The participants in the experiment were offered a text whose content was an incomplete (with the omission of a single fragment) narration about an event. The task was to answer the question “What is this story about?”. The number of words in the answer was not limited. Sample Job:

The little girl, crying, runs up to her mother. Mother asks her:

- Masha, what's wrong with you?

- Yes, Dad hung the picture and hit himself on the finger with a hammer.

- Why are you crying?

- And I laughed.

The above task is of particular interest to identify the ability of children to perceive the holistic meaning of speech work. To perform a task of this type, the subject must restore the missing fragment in the shortest time period at the level of hidden verbal and cognitive operations, which is possible only when the

His ideas about the integrity of the text. How did the children of different ages cope with the task? We will give sample answers:

6-7 years

This is a story about a girl / ... and mother //

10-11 years old

It says here / that / the girl was crying / and complained to her mother // And that / her father was nailing ... / hung a picture //

15-16 years old

The story about that / that the daughter laughed / at dad / when he hit himself with a hammer // He gave her a headstrip and she began to cry / ... and ran to complain to mom / 1

The results obtained confirm and complement the findings of the first experiment. Attempts by 6-7-year-olds to understand the text were unsuccessful: in carrying out the assignment, the first-graders simply became stumped; the discourse presented for understanding seemed to them completely meaningless. Middle-aged schoolchildren (10-11 years old) were able to quite accurately reproduce the speech work given to them, which, as a rule, they either perceive as meaningless, or (after some deliberation) interpret incorrectly. Almost all high school students were able to adequately understand the discourse given to them for perception: the first reaction when reading (after literally a second pause) is laughter; after that they gave a description of the events depicted in the text, restoring the missing fragment.

Summarizing the data of experiments and draw conclusions about the nature of the evolution of speech thinking.

After completing the stage of self-study of language as a system, the linguistic personality, within the framework of discursive behavior, is capable of speech actions based on activities within a specific situation. Without reliance on visually contemplated or imagined facts or phenomena, the child is not yet able to construct speech works containing textual meanings. Discursive thinking at this age is limited to verbal modeling of one-act actions at the level of one or two sentences. By the end of primary school age, the child acquires the ability for the most important latent operations of folding and unfolding information, which will form the basis of his inner speech. Ability to internally

Early planning of speech activity allows the adolescent to construct a discourse to break away from the specific situation and to build holistic, coherent speech works that contain complex, hierarchically organized textual meanings. However, the internalization of external speech activity into the inner vocal in younger adolescents is not very deep: complex semantic ones are not yet available to them. building on the deep semantic level of generation and understanding of the utterance. The discursive behavior of middle school students, despite the automation of the process of creating texts, is not always meaningful; speech and thinking in the process of constructing texts are not yet completely merged. Such a connection in the normal development of the linguistic personality is observed only by the end of school childhood. It is at this age that the student acquires the ability to build complex verbal-logical operations in internal speech. This is due to an even greater internalization of external speech processes, which affects the most profound semantic stages of speech activity - the stages of the formation of the concept, based on subtle operations of anticipation (anticipation), compression (compression) and transcoding of information from the verbal code to the code of individual personal meanings (CPC) and many others others

To conclude, we can generalize the path of development of human discursive thinking as a process accompanying the social and intellectual development of a person, in which, during the internalization of external speech forms in the verbal speech, there is an increasing convergence of textual methods of modeling reality and deep cognitive-mental processes.