WORK
Thought and Language
Vygotsky's 1934 masterwork, published weeks before his death — the definitive statement of the cultural-historical account of linguistic cognition, and the book that established inner speech as a central concept in the psychology of thought.
Thought and Language (Myshlenie i rech', 1934) is Vygotsky's attempt to specify the developmental relationship between thinking and speaking. Against both the behaviorist reduction of thought to subvocal speech and the Wurzburg school's separation of thought from language, Vygotsky argued that thought and language originate independently in the young child, converge around age two when the child discovers that each thing has a name, and thereafter develop in interlocking fashion — with language progressively internalized as a tool of thought through the sequence of social speech, egocentric speech, and inner speech. The book's seven chapters cover the Piaget disagreement, Stern's theory of language, experimental study of concept formation, the development of scientific concepts in childhood, and the final chapter on thought and word that contains the most sustained treatment of inner speech ever written.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's seventh chapter is the single most influential document in the cultural-historical tradition.