Cognition and language

It's one more of those eternal mysteries: language and thinking. Do we need language to think? Does thinking happen only in a language? After all, we all know language is a medium.

I have always wondered whether we actually needed a language for thinking. But some language teacher-friends of mine have always argued that thinking involves a language. After all, they say, our inner dialogues are always in some recognizable language or the other. True. But the dialogue is still a dialogue - internal or external to us. Is it the same as the process of thinking? A dialogue still expresses an outcome of the process. That's been my contention.

Recently, a colleague talked about a friend's two-year-old child who did not speak but could communicate his needs and desires very well. The child, she said, could also associate articles with their owners, and sort steel dishes from china ones. There it was. Obviously here was evidence of cognitive activity that did not have the scaffold of any language.

After all, how do babies learn to speak. They learn by associating sounds (words) with objects they represent or symbolize. The association, the memory, the recall and retrieval are intuitive cognitive processes stimulated by sensory perceptions. And it is this cognitive activity that generates this beautiful thing called language. [And which baby ever started learning his mother tongue with a,b,c? - but that calls for another post.] The child is not thinking in a language.

So also with the hearing impaired. They cannot hear a language but that is not to say they are not thinking. Obviously their sensory impulses are transcribed into some other internal language that helps to identify perceptions and associate them with others, to interpret an experience and understand a context. Their engagement with the world is through non-linguistic means.

And yet most of us think we cannot make do without a language. The problem is we have become so dependent on language that we have gradually reduced usage of all the other media of communication open to us: music, rhythm, touch, feel, movement, stillness and even silence.

The glow of pride, the glower of irritation, the beam of happiness, the sudden flicker of an eyebrow, the puckering of the lips - even slight motions can convey messages. Body language is a great communicator, indeed a great revealer.

Silence is a very powerful tool. In this instant response world, silence can be a great tormentor. Even an innocuous, unintended silence can be interpreted in a hundred obnoxious ways to drive away one's peace of mind. Lack of communication is itself a message, a communication.

Neither thinking nor communication actually need a language.