item froma wealthof empiricalevidence:Astington (1996)reportsWnding a
high correlation between language-ability and children’s capacity to pass
false-belief tasks, whose solution requires them to attribute, and reason
from, the false belief of another person. Do not these and similar data show
that language is constitutively involved in children’s thinking? In the same
spirit,wemaybe temptedtocite the immensecognitivedeWcitswhichcanbe
observed in those rare cases where children grow up without exposure to
natural language. Consider, for example, the cases of so-called ‘wolf
children’, who have survived in the wild in the company of animals, or of
children kept by their parents locked away from all human contact (Mal-
son, 1972; Curtiss, 1977). Consider, also, the cognitive limitations of
profoundly deaf children born of hearing parents, who have not yet learned
to sign (Sachs, 1989; Schaller, 1991). These examples might be thought to
show that human cognition is constructed in such a way as to require the
presence of natural language if it is to function properly.
But all that such data really show is, again, that language is anecessary
condition forcertain kinds of thought and cognition; not that it is actually
implicated inthose forms of cognition. And this is easily explicable from
the standpoint of someone who endorses the standard cognitive-science-
conception of language, as being but an input/output system for central
cognition. For language, in human beings, is a necessary condition of
normal enculturation. Without language, there are many things which
children cannot learn; and with delayed language, there are many things
which children will only learn later. It is only to be expected, then, that
cognitive and linguistic development should proceed in parallel. It does
not follow that language is itself actuallyused inchildren’s central cog-
nition.
Stronger claims may be extracted from the work of Vygotsky
(1934/1986), who argues that language and speech serve toscaVoldthe
development of cognitive capacities in the growing child. Researchers
working in this tradition have studied the self-directed verbalisations of
young children – for example, observing the eVects of their soliloquies on
their behaviour (Diaz and Berk, 1992). They found that children tended to
verbalise more when task demands were greater, and that those who
verbalised most tended to be more successful in problem-solving. But this
claim oflinguistic scaVoldingof cognition admits of a spectrum of read-
ings. At its weakest, it says no more than has already been conceded above,
that language may be anecessary condition forthe acquisition of certain
cognitive skills. At its strongest, on the other hand, the idea could be that
language forms part of the functioning of the highest-level executive
system – which would then make it a variant of the ideas to be discussed in
sections 3.4 and 3.5 below.
The place of natural language in thought 213