Selected Writings of A.R. Luria

Michael Cole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138045521
• eBook ISBN: 9781351696289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume contains various articles that are a sample of the ideas constructed and facts collected by Alexander Romanovich Luria during more than half a century of psychological research.

Part Two
Developmental Studies

A Child’s Speech Responses and the Social Environment

A. R. Luria

The Influence of the Environment in Speech Responses

Modern psychology has come to the firm view that human personality is shaped by its concrete sociohistorical circumstances. We can think of no form of behavior that can be studied in isolation from this historical context, by itself, independent of the specific sociohistorical conditions determining it.

The dialectical method obliges us to reject a static concept of behavior in which the various types of behavior are studied independently of the environmental conditions and general context within which they develop. Both our theoretical premises and practical experience have brought us to the definite conclusion that no psychological function can be understood except in terms of its development (the genetic approach) and its particular social conditions (the sociological approach). Only by tackling the problem of the role played by concrete sociohistorical and cultural conditions in transforming behavior can we hope to arrive at an adequate appreciation of how behavior patterns are shaped.

In the first part of this study (1), in which we undertook a genetic analysis of a child's speech responses, we attempted to trace the general lines of development of children's speech. In this second part, our aim will be to shed some light on the social factors involved in this process. Again, our emphasis will be on the psychological aspects of speech rather than on its phonetic and grammatical aspects. We shall attempt to explore the psychological aspects of the speech of children from different social groups, and on the basis of this material we hope to be able to ascertain some of the distinctive features of the speech pattern (and to a certain extent the thought patterns) of children reared in different social environments.

More than any other aspect of our behavior, speech is the product of the specific historical circumstances in which it develops. Since its primary function is to promote communication, an individual's speech develops under conditions of maximum interaction with others. The more intimate, the more lively this interaction, the more rapidly will speech develop, and the richer will be its content. Drawing its content, as it does, from direct social experience, speech naturally reflects the richness or barrenness of the social environment in which the experience takes place; accordingly, it should not be surprising if the speech of children from different social classes were not at all similar. Indeed, if we examine the speech of these children, we find that it faithfully reflects the distinctive features of the environment from which it has sprung.

Social conditions play a tremendously important role in shaping speech; indeed, speech is social in nature, and communicative in both function and origin. But this is not the only reason why speech is so dependent on social factors; it is, in fact, also an extremely vital tool of thought; it is intimately involved in all of a child's intellectual operations — indeed, in all his intellectual experience. And since this intellectual experience is directly linked with specific features of the social environment, it is reasonable to assume that the particular environment in which a child grows up also plays a maximum role in the development of speech, which in turn gives shape and form to the individual's social experience. Accordingly, it should occasion no surprise that the speech of a working-class child in a large city, the speech of a child from a backward country area, and the speech of a homeless urchin who has been deprived of a stable social environment should be radically dissimilar.

Finally, there is one other factor that deserves detailed scrutiny in this study. If we are right in saying that speech is thought's most vital cultural tool, it should follow that it is one of the most readily influenced of psychological processes. Any structured pedagogical environment or, to put it in other terms, any placement of a child in a structured social situation will stimulate and structure that child's speech, which will then serve as a vehicle for the subsequent transformation of his intellectual operations. Conversely, any inadequately structured environment will lead to the opposite result: if special intellectual uses of speech are not developed, it will remain entrapped in its rudimentary state. Speech may fulfill its communicative functions quite adequately, yet be poorly suited for complex intellectual activity. We therefore thought it might be instructive to compare the speech and intelligence of a child who had been exposed to structured pedagogical influences over a prolonged period with the speech and intelligence of a child who had been deprived of an adequately structured environment within which to grow and develop. By carefully comparing and contrasting children in these two categories we hoped to shed light on some of the specific features of the speech and intelligence of children brought up under different circumstances and to clarify the role played by a structured pedagogical environment in the transformation of a child's psychological processes.

Our subjects in this study were schoolchildren and homeless urchins.

Our method was extremely simple, but adequate to our purposes. We had decided to investigate what direct speech responses children from different social groups would give to various verbal stimuli. In emphasizing the immediacy, the spontaneity even, of a child's speech responses, we of course thereby excluded any direct study of knowledge learned in school. We decided to limit ourselves as far as possible to an investigation of the natural course followed by associative processes when they were not influenced by the particulars of any specific situation. We therefore neither asked the children any questions, assigned them problems or tasks, nor imposed any restrictions on their intellectual activity during the experiment by giving specific instructions. The three groups – urban children, rural children, and homeless children – were placed in a situation in which their intelligence had free play. Our goal was to obtain an "intellectual profile," an "instantaneous portrait," so to speak, of the natural associative processes of children living in different social environments.

This obliged us to employ a simple association experiment as our method; and the results, which we shall analyze in detail in the present essay, demonstrate that this method was quite suited to describing the specific features of the speech and intellectual activities of children from different social environments. Indeed, if we took a rigorously deterministic position, we would have to concede that ideas that cropped up "spontaneously" in our minds were actually a long way from being spontaneous. Their occurrence is determined wholly by our previous social experience, and the "spontaneous" ideas of an urban, a rural, and a homeless child will be entirely different. A person's class and his particular social experience fill his mind with a quite specific content, and the study of this content not only is of considerable interest for the infant science of psychology of classes but is also of indisputable pedagogical interest, since it sheds light on specific features of the intellectual resources of the children from different social environments with whom our pedagogue will come into contact.

What we here mean by intellectual resources has nothing whatever to do with the skills a child learns in school. If we analyze these resources we can get an idea what associations are the most vivid for a child of a given social background and what his socially shaped experience has been. Thus the indices we worked out for assessing this general experiential background first of all characterized the environment in which the child was brought up and only secondarily reflected the child's stage of development. We should be prepared to find that the results obtained in a study of children of different ages but the same social backgrounds would have much more in common than the corresponding information obtained about children of the same age but different social backgrounds.

However, we undertook the series of involved experiments and calculations that such a study requires not just because we wanted to analyze the elemental content of the intellectual resources of children from different social environments. A peasant child's richest and most vivid associations will be rooted in his rural environment, and it is just these associations that will be the most barren in the urban child; on the other hand, in the schoolchild these differences will tend to be evened out by what he learns in school, gaps in his experience will be filled, his experience will become more harmonious, and his intellectual resources will become richer — these observations certainly did not require any deep and detailed investigation. But the fact is that we expected our experiments to yield other data as well.

We do not believe that the social environment supplies merely the content of every individual's experience and nothing more; on the contrary, it determines a vast range of characteristics inherent in the basic mechanisms underlying a person's reactions and, ultimately, the overall pattern of the reactions of the social group to which the individual belongs.

Let us consider each of these factors individually and attempt briefly to explain just what we mean by these statements.

Associative Mechanisms and Environmental Influences

First, the social circumstances in which a child grows up will inevitably leave their mark on the mechanisms underlying complex psychological processes, not just on the content of those processes. This is especially true of associative processes, which in both their genesis and their function are the most directly exposed to the influence of environmental factors acting on them.

Let us take a relatively simple example. A child's speech responses occur at a definite pace or speed; this speed corresponds both to the customary pace of his intellectual activity and to the extent of his command over his linguistic and associative processes. (2) We may even go one step farther. There can be no question that the particular social conditions in which the child has had to develop are also inevitably reflected in the pace and the extent of his command of his language. It is quite understandable that the relatively slow and quiet pace of country life is hardly conducive to the development of quick and lively behavior; and the behavior of a person living under the conditions of an individual household economy, often even in an almo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• I. Early beginnings
• II. Developmental studies
• III. Neuropsychology