Abstract
Language and cognition both appear in humans not in their raw form, but framed in a certain pedagogy. In his classic work on the relation between early linguistic development and early cognitive development, Vygotsky pointed out that, right from its inception in an individual's development, language couples the initially (ontogenetically and functionally) independent functions of speech and thought. He stresses that, as the child grows into a full encounter with the world of work, her own private narratives give way to an adult-mediated, non-fantasy-laden access to the public articulation of what her words really mean. Recent lexical conceptual research reaffirms Vygotsky. Current work on the multicoded nature of adult scientific use of language also indicates that understanding the child's cognitive and linguistic growth can help make sense of the multisemiotic writings of science.
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