RE: Insight #5: Verbal thinking - a "hardfork" of speech
Interesting read, but what are your thoughts for dyslexic babies as they're thought process does not consist of verbal thought but visual thought. In fact, dyslexics have little to no internal monologue until much later and must be developed as a skill. Being dyslexic myself, I can't think in verbal thought only visually, taking advantage of my spatial recognition skills to process the combination of symbols that make up a word and matching those words to object to understand exactly what it is. When you said, "The development of thoughts and all intellectual functions is very much determined by the child's verbal skills, so one of the most important tasks of education should be to support the development of rich and effective spoken language.", I though I should bring to your attention visual and dominantly right brained thinkers, as this statement is not quite correct from visual thinking perspective. I encourage you to add within your research and righting's those with this difference in cognition as the development of our intellectual functions were determined through innate visual skills.
Hello, thank you for your in-depth comment!
As far as I know dyslexia is associated with problems in connecting the speech/language with written language, that is - making a connection between visual characteristics of the text and the language structure. It does not mean dyslectics have not verbal speech. I don't want to argue with you, but I doubt that you "can't think in verbal thought". I suppose you have learnt how to speak before you understood the nature of text, so this part: " taking advantage of my spatial recognition skills to process the combination of symbols that make up a word and matching those words to object to understand exactly what it is" took place much later in you development. If you are dominantly visual you probably use more visual skills to proceed speech, but I think it's still verbal thought. You propably more "see" words in your head than "hear" them.
But you are right that people who are dominant with visual thinking can have less verbal thought and are better at some tasks than other people (e.g. graphic design, architecture, geometry, etc.) but they are probably worse in task involving verbal skills (so they may don't like to write essays for example). We don't use verbal thinking 100% of the time - while drawing, daydreaming or playing with Lego we usually don't use verbal thought at all - we just use spatial and visual skills. So I guess you propably can do more tasks using these skills as they are better developed in you than in other people.
PS I had dysorthography and dysgraphia when I was a child, fortunately I managed to almost totaly get rid of ortographic mistakes in my native language (polish) and my writing is readable now :D
Thank you for replying and clearing that up, I apologize if I came off as rude I definitely did not mean it as an argument. Great write up!
I did not regard this as being impolite :) I must add that I'm not an expert on this topic - I have master's degree in psychology but I don't have any specialization yet, so I might be slightly wrong here and there.