Language and Thought, Judgment and Reasoning of the Child*

Two outstanding and glaring assumptions have in the past prevented any real understanding of the thought processes of the child and their evolution, unfolding into those of the adult, as depending upon genetic laws of development. These assumptions were, first, that the child was a small adult and that to so consider him was an adequate envisagement of him as a functioning organism. In examining the child mind, therefore, the mistake was made of subjecting it to adult standards. And second, it was assumed that the progressive development of the child mind was in the main a process of addition of new facts along the path of experience and the subtraction of certain errors, also the result of experience, instead of realizing that the child mind is a different kind of mind, that the child thinks in a different way, the quality of its thdught and the process of its thinking differing from the developed adult mind.

While language and thought are obviously related and the study of one cannot be divorced completely from the study of the other, still we find in this connection another assumption that interferes with our understanding of language; namely, that the sole function of language is to communicate thought. Aside from certain reflex sounds associated with certain states of the body such as the cry of pain and the interjections such as “brrr” indicative of cold or chilliness, and the onomatopoeias such as “bang,” “crash,” “snap,” “hiss,” “roar,” “chirp,” “quack,” etc., there is the whole field of the evocative function of speech; that is, the use of speech to evoke a certain desired state in another, such as the cry of the child or patient producing anxiety and solicitous care in mother or nurse. And then while language is used largely as a tool for social intercourse it is certainly not so used when one talks to himself, and when