Thought without language?

     This most recent jigsaw experience was a bit different.  For one thing, under discussion was not a collection of readings but a trio of audio files from the WNYC series Radiolab: "Words that changed the world," "Voices in your head," and "New words, new world."  For another, many people listened to all of the files, not just the one they had signed up for, which would never happen with the readings.
     "Words that changed the world" was the longest and most varied bit, weaving together the voices of several personal narratives and expert insights.  We meet Susan Schaller, whose recovery from head trauma led her to become an interpreter of American Sign Language, which led her to meet a deaf man in his twenties who not only couldn't speak or sign but had no conception of language whatsoever.  Schaller explains that when she first met him, he would simply mimic her movements; it took many months of training before he was finally able to connect her signing with meaning.
     This led to a discussion about what thought would be like without language: before this man possessed the knowledge that words represent things and ideas in the world, what were his thoughts like?  Although the man is now able to communicate, he is either unwilling or unable to answer this question.
     Consider instead a behavioral experiment designed to compare the thinking of rats against the thinking of humans.  Take a rectangular room that's completely white, hide a treat in one of the corners, and then spin the subject around so there's no telling which way is what.  You've got a 50% chance of choosing the right corner.  Paint one of the walls blue, however, and it should be a lot easier to pick which corner the goody is in.  Turns out that's true for adults, but it's not true for rats and also not true for children younger than 6.  Apparently the ideas for "wall" and "blue" and "left/right" have no connection with each other in the brains of rats and babies, and in the case of babies these connections do not exist until their language skills advance to a certain point.  To prove that it's not a fluke, experimenters tried the blue-wall-with-a-treat-in-the-corner trick on adults whose language processing abilities were temporarily interrupted by a stream of blather pouring out of headphones.  The experiment showed that language is a necessary component to thinking.  One of the scientists even went so far as to say that babies don't think, or at least "not in any way that I would want to call thinking."

     So going back to the question, What is thought without language? - and a new question I would dare to pose, which is, What does this have to do with the Content Area Literacy class? - let's consider yet another question:  Can you imagine thinking without using language?  Think about it for a minute - if you are not allowed to use any words, what's left of your thoughts besides sensory representations?  Do we even have the ability to separate language from thinking?
     The idea they're driving at is that the way that we think about everything is so deeply connected with language that we cannot tease the two apart.  In order to think beyond the capability of a hungry rat, our brains must connect all the separate pieces of information about the world, and those connections don't exist without language to help us.
     The "Voices in your head" segment explains how this works in more detail using the holistic theories of Lev Vygotsky as a starting point and another diabolical experiment as illustration.  As explained in the audio, Vygotsky's notion of how we come to think goes like this: parents talk to baby, toddler imitates this dialogue by talking to self, child continues the "dialogue" by internalizing conversations with imaginary others.  Basically, we all hear "voices in our heads," just those of us who aren't categorized as schizophrenic tend to have an easier time remembering that those voices are really just our own selves.  If this model is true, then it would be impossible to conceive of thinking without the use of language.
     So, again - what does any of this have to do with literacy?  Assuming that it's true that high-level thinking requires language, then it stands to reason that the stronger one's language skills, the higher one's thinking will be.  The flipside is that people with low language skills will have a correspondingly low ability to think.  This puts students who struggle with literacy skills at a disadvantage, not just in the classroom but in the rest of their lives as well.
     Instead of viewing intelligence as a concrete and static ability, teachers especially need to understand people as "works in progress."  When we see a student struggling, we need to recognize that it is not his or her fault and that it's not always an indication of ability. Maybe it's simply that the student needs our help in developing the language necessary to be able to put it all together.