Language in Thinking

A Penguin Modern Psychology reader, first published 1972, selection and introduction copyright Parveen Adams. Nineteen papers in five parts, arranged as an argument rather than a survey: “Learning without Language” opens with the Gardners on teaching sign language to a chimpanzee and three studies of deaf children, set there deliberately to dislodge the reader from assuming all conceptual development is language-linked. Then B. L. WHORF on habitual thought and behaviour, MALINOWSKI’s supplement to The Meaning of Meaning, Lenneberg, PIAGET on language and thought from the genetic point of view, VYGOTSKY twice (“Thought and Word” and the concept-formation study), Ervin-Tripp, Sinclair-de-Zwart, and CHOMSKY on the linguistic contribution to the study of mind. Its cover is the same Penguin Modern Psychology design as Pribram’s Adaptation, in violet rather than gold.