Thinking is a social phenomenon that follows the phenomenon of language. Therefore, thinking does not exist without language, as well as, thinking and language cannot exist without society. This implies that Society is the basis of the emergence of both, language and thinking. Moreover, thinking cannot exist without reality as a context for it to take place in. To be able to define what is not present, we have to observe what is present.
Can babies think? Do they have a language? And which takes place first?Thinking or language?
Does thinking emerge before language or the opposite, since thinking cannot exist without language?
Human is born and has the ability to observe and create distnctions whilst he/she has no information, except that little which has been acquired when he/she was in his/her mother’s womb at a late stage of pregnancy, when hearing has been activated.
The baby hears the mother’s heart, her voice and the father’s voice, and the external recurring voices. This allows the baby to familiarize with these voices and recognize them, and reacts differently with them depending on the intensity of each voice, in terms of tone and warmth.
Babies react with the various voice wavelengths or frequencies rather than the meaning of what is being said.
Based on these interactions, babies feel and express love, happiness, satisfaction and peace or angry, worry and fear.
These emotional reactions are psychological and do not require the action of thinking or the use of words for expression.
This indicates that a baby starts to consciously observe and recognize some simple events that happen whilst in his/her mother’s womb.
And when the baby is born, he/she continues to practice conscious emotional interaction and observation, a process which is not defined as thinking, but rather as but cognition and interaction.
At this stage of emotional and mental cognition the baby starts to interact with his/her acoustic system (vocal cords) and to sense reality, and he/she starts to produce voices that come out easily such as ‘ghh – the sound similar to what happens when gargling’ which is usually the easiest due to the saliva gathering in the baby’s throat
The baby makes this voice unconsciously and as he/she hears it, he/she repeatedly produces it.
Similarly, the voices ‘rrr’, ‘mmm’, ‘bbb’which get saved in his/her memory for future use.
These voices accumulate in the baby’s memory to get an acoustical stock which he/she can refer to so as to later produce two voices together such as ‘baa’ or ‘maa’, and it is usually observed that babies are able to pronounce the sounds of vowels easily. This process does not require the act of thinking neither for a society to take place in, but rather emotional cognition and for a group of people to be part of.
This indicates that the basis of language as two combined sounds or voices is given birth to at the cognitional level of the baby before he/she begins to interact with people or before he/she begins to think.
As the baby grows, becomes part of society and starts to activate thinking (building connections and making analyses), through interaction with reality and by obtaining external information, his/her sounds expand..
The dual voices expand, and he/she starts using words with three voiceseither by combing various sounds stored in the memory or by adding a third voice to the dual voices, in order to express a new meaning that he/she feels and would like to communicate it to others.
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