Ixxv This book is a study of one of the most complex problems in psychology, the interrelation of thought and speech.

p.3 inner speech... facilitates the selection of essential material from the nonessential.

p.32 the so-called law of awareness, which was formulated by Claparede and which states that an impediment or disturbance in an automatic activity makes the author aware of this activity... speech is an expression of that process of becoming aware.

p.33 inner speech and voiced egocentric speech fulfill the same function

p.33 We observed how egocentric speech at first marked the end result or a turning point in an activity, then was gradually shifted toward the middle and finally to the beginning of an activity, taking on a directing, planning function and raising the child's acts to the level of purposeful behavior.

p.37 Egocentric speech emerges when the child transfers social, collaborative forms of behavior to the sphere of inner-personal psychic functions.

p.44 the well-known thesis of Francis Bacon, that real knowledge is knowledge that goes to causes.

p.180 perception in terms of meaning always implies a degree of generalization.

p.181 a new way of seeing things opens up new possibilities for handling them. A chessplayer's moves are determined by what he sees on the board; when his perception of the game changes, his strategy will also change. In perceiving some of our acts in a generalizing fashion, we isolate them from our total mental activity and are thus enabled to focus on this process as such and to enter into a new relation to it.

p.181 In operating with spontaneous concepts, the child is not conscious of them because his attention is always centered on the object to which the concept refers, never on the act of thought itself.

p.182 To us it seems obvious that a concept can become subject to conscious and deliberate control only when it is part of a system.

p.183 Marx... wrote that "if the appearance and essence of things were similar, there would be no need to have science."

p.199 The cleverest animal is incapable of intellectual development through imitation. It can be drilled to perform specific acts, but the new habits do not result in new general abilities... it can be said that animals are unteachable... In the child's development, on the contrary, imitation and instruction play a major role.

p.203 This is the key point of our hypothesis. The child becomes conscious of his spontaneous concepts relatively late; the ability to define them in words, to operate with them at will, appears long after he has acquired the concepts. He has the concept (i.e. knows the object to which the concept refers), but is not conscious of his own act of thought.

p.206 In one's native language, the primitive aspects of speech are acquired before the more complex ones.

p.221 For example, our working hypothesis was not complete at the moment when we started our experiments. Hypothesis and experiment - these two poles of one dynamic whole, as Kurt Lewin called them - developed and grew side by side

p.244 To turn our hypothesis into a certainty, we must devise an experiment capable of showing which of the two interpretations is correct. What are the data for this critical experiment?

p.246 Three- to five-year-olds while playing together often speak only to themselves. What looks like a conversation turns out to be a collective monologue... Children who are participants of the collective monologue do believe that they communicate with each other. They believe that their thoughts, even those that are poorly expressed or unarticulated, belong to all participants.

p.246 And yet it is experiment, and not interpretations, that can resolve the problem

p.255 Dialogue always presupposes in the partners sufficient knowledge of the subject to permit abbreviated speech and, under certain conditions, purely predicative sentences.

p.258 Piaget once mentioned that we trust ourselves without proof; the necessity to defend and articulate one's position appears only in conversation with others.

p.258 The child talks about the things he sees or hears or does at the moment. As a result, he tends to leave out the subject and all words connected with it, condensing his speech more until only predicates are left... Inner speech is speech almost without words.

p.264 in inner speech words die as they bring forth thought. Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings. It is a dynamic, shifting, unstable thing, fluttering between word and thought, the more or less stable, more of less firmly delineated components of verbal thought. Its true nature and place can be understood only after examining the next plane of verbal thought, the one still more inward than inner speech.