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The Role of Inner Speech in the Construction of an

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Article  in  Journal of Russian and East European Psychology · May 2003

DOI: 10.2753/RPO1061-040541030449

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Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 41, nos. 3/4,
May–June/July–August 2003, pp. 49–74.
© 2003 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1061–0405/2003 $9.50 + 0.00.

T.V. AKHUTINA

The Role of Inner Speech in the

Construction of an Utterance

The author of this article is one of the leading young investigators

from the Luria school of neurolinguistics. She has studied and con-
ducted extensive research both with Luria and with A.A. Leontiev, a
major figure in Soviet psycholinguistics. Her analysis of inner speech
as a mechanism in speech production reveals the strong influence
that L.S. Vygotsky has had on Soviet psychology. Although investi-
gators such as Luria and A.A. Leontiev have made independent con-
tributions to the study of inner speech, the principal ideas about its
role in speech production were introduced by Vygotsky in the 1930s.
When reading Akhutina’s account of speech production, the
Western investigator will undoubtedly note that it includes several
mechanisms unlike anything currently used in our psycholinguistic
or neurolinguistic models. For example, motives and intentions
have long since disappeared from the psycholinguistic scene in
the West. It is worthwhile to take a moment to analyze their source
in Soviet research.
Basically, we can say that the set of ideas included in this approach

English translation © 1978, 2003 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., translated from the Rus-
sian text © 1975 Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet. T.V. Akhutina,
Neirolingvisticheskii analiz dinamicheskoi afazii [The Neurolinguistic Analysis
of Dynamic Aphasia] (Moscow: Moscow University Press, 1975), chapter 2. Pre-
viously published in Soviet Psychology, Spring 1978, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 3–30.

49
50 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

is so different from the set to which we are accustomed because

Vygotsky started out with assumptions about the nature of language
and speech that are very different from those underlying contempo-
rary research in Western neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics. In
developing a Marxist psychology, Vygotsky emphasized the func-
tional role that speech served in social interaction and human thought.
This meant that he did not limit his analysis of speech production or
comprehension to the processing of the propositional content of an
utterance. To try to explain how human speech could mediate social
interaction, he insisted on a complete account of how utterance
meaning plays a role in this interaction. This led him to include such
theoretical apparatuses as motive, intention, and sense (as opposed
to meaning) in his account.
Recent psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic models in the West
have been based on a very different set of implicit assumptions.
For the most part, these models have borrowed their conceptual
foundations from linguistics. During the past twenty years, this
has meant some form of transformational generative grammar. In
laying the metatheoretical foundations for research in this field,
Chomsky specifically limited his investigation to the linguistic code
and ignored factors of language use and function. The impact of
this work is apparent in much of Western psycholinguistic and
neurolinguistic research.
One of the most important distinctions that Vygotsky made in
his analysis of inner speech and its role in speech production was
that between meaning [znachenie] and sense [smysl]. Similar dis-
tinctions have played important roles in philosophical approaches
to meaning in the West. Perhaps the most important instance of
this is to be found in the work of Frege. Unfortunately, a precedent
has been established in translating Frege and Vygotsky that makes
Frege’s “sense” roughly equivalent to Vygotsky’s “meaning” and
Frege’s “meaning” roughly equivalent to Vygotsky’s “sense.” As
Dummett (1973)* points out, Frege never actually used a term to

*M. Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language (New York: Harper and Row,
1973).
 MAY–JUNE/JULY–AUGUST 2003 51

express the general notion of “meaning”; but by going through his

work carefully, Dummett has deduced that there seems to be a
general notion of meaning implicit in Frege’s work, one that is
made of up sense, tone, and force.
Even without going any further into Dummett’s account, any-
one the least bit familiar with Frege’s work can readily see that his
idea that sense is only one of the ingredients in meaning is very
similar to Vygotsky’s (1956)* idea (with the terms reversed) that
“The dictionary meaning of a word is no more than a stone in the
edifice of sense, no more than a potentiality that finds diversified
realization in speech” (pp. 369–70). Insistence on the neurolinguist’s
and psycholinguist’s facing problems concerned with sense as well
as meaning typifies the Soviet approach. It is only recently that a
few Western psycholinguists, such as Rommetveit and H. Clark,
have begun to insist that we study the processing of what Vygotsky
called “sense” as well as what he called “meaning.” The present
article will hopefully provide some further insights into how the
problem is being studied in the USSR.

James V. Wertsch, Ph.D.

Department of Linguistics
Northwestern University

Luria’s view

We shall begin our review of current thinking about speech pro-

duction with the description given by investigators who have stud-
ied dynamic aphasia. This is appropriate inasmuch as, in the pre-
vious chapter, in describing speech disorders of patients with
dynamic aphasia, we borrowed certain expressions from Luria and
Tsvetkova, such as “intention,” the “internal schema of a sentence,”
and “expansion of a verbal utterance,” without, however, explain-
ing what these terms meant. This was, of course, because in these

*L.S. Vygotsky, Izbrannye psikhologicheskie issledovaniia [Selected Psycho-

logical Studies] (Moscow, 1956).
52 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

works the authors themselves do not give a full explanation of

these terms; neither do they provide a general description of the
process of the construction of an utterance. We were therefore
obliged to turn to other studies by these same authors to find a
presentation of their views on this process. In his [Course in Gen-
eral Psychology] (lithographed edition, Moscow, 1965, chapter
entitled [The Psychology of a Verbal Utterance]), Luria gives the
following psychological analysis of speech production.
Following Vygotsky, Luria postulates that “A verbal utterance
ordinarily begins with its motive” [Luria’s emphasis—T.A.] He
goes on to explain: “To produce any utterance, a human being
must first have a need to say something to someone else. This
motive is the deepest, most fundamental, most basic moment in
the formation of an utterance.” And then:
The second stage of an utterance follows on the heels of the first,
motivational stage. This second stage we can call the thought of an
utterance. In verbal communication there is always some thought or
sense the speaker wants to convey to his auditor. This thought, always
at the starting point of an utterance, must ultimately be embodied in
speech; and it is this embodiment of a thought in verbal utterance that
is the basic psychological content of an utterance.
Later, in analyzing the transformation of a thought into speech,
Luria observes:
An utterance always begins with a very vague thought [Luria’s emphasis—
T.A.], which internally is marked out in only the most general, sche-
matic way. It is not present in my consciousness in anything that could
be called a full-fledged, expanded form: it is no more than the intention,
the first germ, of a thought, a general schema representing what I want
to say; this schema, these bare bones, as it were, of an utterance must
still be given flesh by dressing them in content in an expanded form.
Luria points out that inner speech is a direct participant in the
transformation of a thought into speech. After expounding on
Vygotsky’s views, which have now become classic, on the dis-
tinctive features of inner speech (abbreviation, predicativity, the
predominance of sense over meaning),1 Luria concludes: “Thus,
 MAY–JUNE/JULY–AUGUST 2003 53

in man thought is intimately connected with inner speech; and this

inner speech, which gives substance and shape to a thought, is
abbreviated and predicative in nature.”
Luria continues:
The third stage is the stage in which a thought is coded into an utter-
ance, i.e., the stage in which inner speech is recoded into external
speech. This process of recoding an inner, abbreviated intention, rooted
in inner speech, into an expanded system of linguistic means is the last
and most important stage in the formation of speech communication.
It is also a process in which inner senses intelligible only to myself are
recoded into external meanings intelligible to others.
Luria, drawing on the studies by Vygotsky, proposes a three-
step model for the formation of an utterance: the motive; the thought
and its transformation into inner speech; and external speech. De-
scribed in terms of the operations it entails, this model would look
as follows: first, emergence of a motive; second, crystallization of
the general intention, the germ of a thought (schema), expressed
in inner speech; and third, recoding inner speech into external
speech.
In his studies of aphasia Luria, for the most part, accepts this
model. Thus, in [Traumatic Aphasia] (1947), he points out that the
motive of an utterance (the instability of a motive, p. 93), inner
speech (pp. 76–106), or external verbalization (pp. 82–92) can all
be impaired. His concept of inner speech here is quite analogous
to our earlier description: inner speech is “an abbreviated verbal
schema that precedes the speech act and provides the basis for its
subsequent expansion” (1947, p. 77).
In his description of dynamic aphasia, this three-step model is
expounded in more detail. Luria points out that a patient with this
form of aphasia “has lost the inner speech schemata that give defi-
nition to the intention of a verbal utterance”; hence, “a rough
thought, not achieving embodiment in some inner speech schema,
does not develop beyond a general, unformed intention” (Luria,
1947, p. 99).
This concept of a stage in which a rough, undifferentiated thought
54 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

is engendered, a stage preceding the elaboration of a formed,

differentiated, inner schema of an utterance, is retained by Luria
in later studies, although he changes his terminology and refers
to this rough, vague thought or intention as a “rough intention,
the germ of a thought.” For example, in the joint study by Luria
and Tsvetkova (1967), they observe that “a rough intention” pre-
cedes the “formulation of a schema” (Luria and Tsvetkova, 1967,
p. 235).
In this revised model, the stage of a rough, undifferentiated inten-
tion is followed by a stage in which the inner schema of an utterance
acquires shape. Let us see how this stage is treated in Luria’s studies
of aphasia. In his book [Traumatic Aphasia] we read:
Studies of speech development by psychologists have shown that the
transition from a thought to expanded speech must be mediated by
inner speech. However, since inner speech has an abbreviated and
embryonic structure and is purely predicative in its function, it con-
tains in latent form the germs of a subsequent dynamic schema of the
sentence. The transition from inner speech to external speech amounts
to an expansion, an unfolding of this preparatory schema, its transfor-
mation into the external, expanded structure of a sentence.
This grammatical structure of active speech, which is based on those
general dynamic schemata linguists refer to as a “feeling for a lan-
guage,” is a very stable formation. But it is just this dynamic schema
of a sentence that is usually severely impaired in the efferent forms of
motor aphasia. (Luria, 1947, pp. 85–86)
We have quoted this passage extensively to show how broad a
range of meaning this term of Luria’s, that is, “the dynamic schema
of a sentence,” is meant to serve. First, it is “the preparatory schema
of an utterance” that “contains latently” within it inner speech that
is developed into the expanded structure of a sentence; and sec-
ond, it is the grammatical structure of a sentence (Luria uses the
expressions “grammatical structure of active speech” and “dynamic
schema of a sentence” synonymously).
The broad conceptualization given to the expression “the dynamic
schema of a sentence” is also reflected in Luria’s interpretation of
agrammatism as a kind of “telegraphic style” . . . and in the likeness
 MAY–JUNE/JULY–AUGUST 2003 55

he draws between this form of agrammatism and the breakdown

in sentence and text structure observed in dynamic aphasia.
We find the expression “sentence schema” used analogously
in the monograph [Higher Cortical Functions of Man] (Luria,
1962, pp. 180, 183) and in the book [The Human Brain and Men-
tal Processes] (Luria, 1963, see pp. 221, 322, and others). In
later works of Luria and Tsvetkova on dynamic aphasia, in which
the problems of agrammatism are not discussed, the term “inner
dynamic schema of a sentence” is replaced by the expression
“linear schema of a sentence,” which is perhaps used in a nar-
rower sense by the authors, although they do not stipulate spe-
cifically how it is used (Luria and Tsvetkova, 1966, 1967, 1968;
Tsvetkova, 1968, 1969).
Let us see how the expressions “inner speech” and the “inner
(linear, syntactical) schema of a sentence” are used by Luria and
Tsvetkova. Usually the expressions are quite close in meaning.
For example, Luria writes that “inner speech” is understood by
modern psychology (see Vygotsky, 1934) as an abbreviated speech
model that precedes the speech act and provides the basis for its
subsequent expansion (Luria, 1947, p. 77; see also 1962, p. 176;
1963, p. 243).
A somewhat different notion of the relationship between inner
speech and the internal (linear) schema of a sentence may be found
in a 1967 publication by Luria and Tsvetkova.2 In this study the
authors pose the question: “Does not this defect [i.e., the speech
disorder accompanying dynamic aphasia—T.A.] derive from the
absence of a sentence schema, i.e., the destruction of the middle
term in the structure of inner speech by virtue of which the transi-
tion from thought to speech is effected?”
In the light of this statement we may presume that the authors
are suggesting that inner speech has a multilevel structure and are
coordinating the formation of the linear schema of a sentence with
“the middle term in the structure of inner speech.”
The multilevel model for inner speech was not hit upon acciden-
tally by Luria. It developed naturally from his efforts to explain the
56 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

differences in how inner speech breaks down in efferent motor

aphasia and dynamic aphasia, respectively.
The way was paved for this hypothesis by Soviet psychology
and its notion of the multilevel structure of inner speech (Anan’ev,
1946, 1960; Sokolov, 1959, 1968). In Anan’ev’s view, one of the
indisputable postulates of inner-speech theory is “that inner speech
is a process that varies in terms of its readiness to be transformed
into external speech.” For Anan’ev, inner speech has the following
phases:
The first phase of inner speech is a fixation on verbalization, in which
a consciousness or awareness of “something,” or that “something” has
happened, has occurred, but has not yet been verbalized.
The next phase is the process of formulation in inner speech of those
reduced phonemic and logico-syntactical structures we have spoken
of in the foregoing [i.e., a sentence with an empty subject and an empty
predicate and phonetic abbreviation—T.A.].
The phase after this is ostensive definition of the place of a verbal-
ized thought in a judgment or inference. This phase, the outward mani-
festation of which is auxiliary, “locative” words (here, there, now), is
important constructively in the expansion of an internal utterance, which
is also the culminating phase of inner speech in this case.
(Inner speech “on the basis of oral speech” is meant. B.G.
Anan’ev, of course, believes that “the forms of inner speech, their
mechanisms and phases, will have properties that are specific to
the kind of speech activity in which they are engendered” [Anan’ev,
1960, p. 367]).
Thus, according to B.G. Anan’ev, the expansion of inner speech
passes through the following phases: (1) a set on verbalization; (2)
verbalization; (3) indication of its location; and (4) the internal
utterance as the culminating phase of inner speech. Examples of
such internal utterances are the internal monologues of the heroes
in Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s stories.
Anan’ev’s hypothesis and the notion of a stage structure of in-
ner speech proposed by Luria and Tsvetkova in their most recent
studies are very similar. One of Anan’ev’s inner speech phases
would be the counterpart of the grammatical expansion of a sen-
 MAY–JUNE/JULY–AUGUST 2003 57

tence. For Anan’ev, inner speech has only the function of con-
structing the content of an impending utterance; it does not struc-
ture that utterance. Thus, his notion of the functions of inner speech
is narrower than that of Luria and Tsvetkova. In their view, the
various stages of inner speech encompass all the inner aspects, all
the functions, of speech.
This broad view of inner speech, however, had already been
criticized by Vygotsky. Vygotsky was, of course, opposed to the
view of Goldstein, who called inner speech “all that precedes the
motor act of speaking, all the internal aspect of speech” (Vygotsky,
1956, p. 339).
To this view of inner speech Vygotsky opposed his own view of
inner speech and its place in verbal thought. In the next section we
shall examine this view and try to determine whether it can explain
observed differences between dynamic and motor aphasia with-
out recourse to the hypothesis of a stage structure of inner speech,
or whether this hypothesis is, after all, necessary.

Vygotsky’s view

Before we present Vygotsky’s views on this problem, let us di-

gress a bit.
There are two kinds of scientific study. The findings of one kind
are immediately assimilated into the body of science. The ideas of
the other kind, on the other hand, only gradually gain scientific
currency; each succeeding generation of scientists finds something
new in them, some material that is particularly relevant for them.
Vygotsky’s scientific heritage certainly belongs to the latter type.
His theory of verbal thought has become a classic of Soviet psy-
chology; but despite this, one of the cardinal aspects of this theory
has not received the attention it deserves. We are thinking of the
psychological analysis of the stages from thought to the word,
that is, the analysis of those structural levels of verbal thought
through which thought passes on its way to its “culmination in a
word.”
58 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

Let us examine this point more closely. In his book [Thought

and Language] (1934, 2d ed., 1956) Vygotsky was concerned with
providing a developmental analysis of the relationships between
thought and language. In contrast to his predecessors, who either
saw thought and language as identical or regarded them as two
independent processes, Vygotsky postulated that thought and lan-
guage occur independently, but thereafter form a complex, quali-
tatively new whole—verbal thought. The properties of this new
entity, like the properties of a chemical compound, are not equal
to the sum of the properties of its component parts. Drawing a
parallel between an analysis by elements and an analysis by units,
Vygotsky distinguished word meaning as the primary unit of ver-
bal thought, that is, a unit that retained all the properties of the
latter yet was not further divisible.
The concept of word meaning underwent a radical revision in
this theory, based on the classical view that “every word is already
a generalization.” “If this is so, i.e., if the meaning of a word is a
generalization, an act of thought, it is not only a unit of speech but
a unit of thought as well” (1956, pp. 49–52, 322).
Since a child’s thought undergoes development (as indeed Piaget
had pointed out), word meaning, which is a particular form of
generalization, cannot remain unaltered. Vygotsky elegantly dem-
onstrated this hypothesis in a series of experiments.
An analysis of the various forms of generalization observed in
children showed that the words a child used corresponded to the
words of an adult only with regard to the objects to which they
referred: they did not correspond in meaning. “In terms of word
meaning, the child thinks the same as an adult, i.e., he thinks about
the same objects, which make understanding possible; but he thinks
the same content in a different way, by different means, and via
different intellectual operations” (1956, p. 191). The discovery of
the variability of word meaning obliged Vygotsky to abandon the
prevalent opinion that a word and its content were linked by
simple association. He concluded that at each stage in a person’s
development, word meaning has a particular structure; and there
 MAY–JUNE/JULY–AUGUST 2003 59

is a particular relationship, determined by this structure, between

thought and language, between idea and word (1956, p. 329).
In the last chapter of this book, Vygotsky analyzes the relation-
ship between thought and word in the mature mind. The central
idea of this chapter is stated as follows:
The relationship between thought and language is not a thing, but a
process, a continual movement back and forth from thought to word
and from word to thought. Viewed in the light of a psychological analy-
sis, this relation is a process that passes through a series of phases and
stages, during which its essential features undergo changes that may
be called development in the strict sense. Of course, this is a func-
tional development, not development in the sense of aging; but the
path traversed by thinking as a process from thought to word is devel-
opment nonetheless.
Vygotsky ends this statement with his famous dictum: “Thought
is not expressed in words; it comes into existence through them”
(1956, p. 330).
Let us examine the various phases and “planes” of this passage
from thought to word.3
Vygotsky begins his analysis with a distinction between the
external plane of speech and an internal plane, very near it, which
he calls the semantic level. In his view, an interaction between two
structures is evident in external speech: the grammatical and the
semantic (psychological). This means that every sentence contains
a grammatical and a psychological subject and predicate. This dis-
tinction shows up, in particular, in logical emphasis: “Thought puts
logical stress on one of the words of a sentence, in this way distin-
guishing the psychological predicate, without which any sentence
is unintelligible” (1945, p. 338). The disparity between these two
levels creates a stereo effect, which reveals the development of a
thought into a word and enables us to penetrate beyond the word
to the thought4 (1956, pp. 330–38).
The semantic level, with its special syntax, which depends on
thought, is only the first of the inner planes of speech. The next is
inner speech.
60 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

For Vygotsky inner speech is a particular, independent aspect

of verbal thought in which all the dynamic relations between
thought and words are concentrated. This is speech in and for one-
self. It emerges from external speech and differs from it by being
maximally abbreviated.
Vygotsky studied in detail the emergence of inner speech in
children. His method was to study the early forms of inner speech—
egocentric children’s speech, which is external in its manifesta-
tions but internal in its structure and functions. By studying inner
speech, which is accessible to direct observation and experimen-
tation, Vygotsky was able to elucidate the general trends of its
development. By examining these trends at their transition points,
he drew certain conclusions concerning the nature of inner speech.
This insightful method was used in several experiments in which
he distinguished the following characteristics of inner speech:
1. It is of a purely predicative nature. “Psychologically, inner
speech consists of predicates only”; “the subject of our inner rea-
son is always present in our thought”; it is always implicitly un-
derstood (1956, pp. 364, 365).
2. The phonetic aspect is diminished. “In inner speech we do
not need to pronounce a word in its entirety. We understand, by
virtue of our very intention, what word we wanted to say. . . .
Strictly speaking, inner speech is almost wordless” (1956, p. 368).
3. It has a semantic structure of its own. Vygotsky distinguishes
the following properties of this structure:
(a) sense predominates over meaning;
(b) agglutination of semantic units;
(c) the influx of “sense”;
(d) it is idiomatic.
Let us take a closer look. Drawing on Paulham’s distinction
between sense and meaning, Vygotsky says: “The dictionary mean-
ing of a word is no more than a stone in the edifice of sense, no
more than a potentiality that finds diversified realization in speech”
(1956, pp. 369, 370). He clarifies the difference between sense
and meaning of a word using as an example the word popliashi
 MAY–JUNE/JULY–AUGUST 2003 61

[go and dance] in Krylov’s fable [The Dragonfly and the Ant.] In a
work of art, the word absorbs the context of the sentence, para-
graph, book, text, indeed, of all the author’s works. In everyday
speech it assimilates the context of the situation, the entire activity
and personality of the speaker (the listener partly penetrates into
the speaker’s sense, and partly adds his own sense). Thus, Vygotsky
contrasts individual, variable, and, in a certain respect, unbounded
sense to general, stable, and bounded meaning.5
The other properties of inner speech have to do with the sense
principle of semantics. Agglutination, which is a way of forming
discrete, complex words to express complex concepts, enables the
influence of sense to make itself felt. “The senses of different words
flow into one another—literally ‘influence’ one another—so that
the earlier ones are contained in, and modify, the later ones” (1956,
p. 372). Because of this, “in inner speech . . . a single word is . . .
saturated with sense” (1956, p. 373).
Finally, the last property of inner speech, its idiomatic nature,
has to do with a change in meaning in inner speech. “Used in inner
speech, each word gradually acquires other nuances, which gradu-
ally merge and coalesce until they are transformed into a new
meaning of the word. These are always individual meanings, in-
telligible only in inner speech, which is as full of idioms as of
ellipses and omissions” (1956, p. 374).
It follows from these characteristics of inner speech that “The
transition from inner speech to external speech is not merely vo-
calization of inner speech but its restructuring, the transformation
of a special syntax, of the semantic and phonetic structure of inner
speech into other structural forms proper to external speech” (1956,
p. 375 [my emphasis—T.A.]). From an analysis of this underlying
semantic level of speech we know that this restructuring, this dy-
namic transformation, is accomplished via a transition from inner
speech to the semantic plane and from the semantic plane to exter-
nal speech. The movement to the semantic plane means that sense
must be conveyed through the meanings of external words and
that purely predicative speech must be replaced by the structures
62 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

of psychological syntax, with an explicit, not an implicit, subject.

Because of these structural features, inner speech, although it is
speech, that is, “thought connected to words,” is a kind of speech
in which the word with its fixed meaning is as unstable and de-
formed as it could be under the influence of thought. “In inner
speech words die” as they bring forth thought. “Inner speech is a
dynamic, unstable, shifting thing, fluttering between word and
thought, the two more or less stable, more or less firmly delin-
eated components of verbal thought. Hence, its true nature and
place can be understood only after examining the next plane of
verbal thought, the one still more internal than inner speech. That
plane is thought itself ” (1956, p. 376).
In singling out this plane from the unity of verbal thought,
Vygotsky points out that “every thought tends to connect some-
thing with something else; it has movement, flow, development—
in short, it fulfills a function, solves a problem. This flow and
movement of thought are not accompanied by a simultaneous un-
folding of speech” (1956, p. 376).
The word must bring this movement of thought to a halt. A
“thought is always a whole, considerably larger in its extension
and scope than an individual word. A speaker often takes several
minutes to disclose one thought. In his mind, the whole thought is
present at once, but in speech it has to be developed successively”
(1956, p. 378 [my emphasis—T.A.]). That is, a thought differs
from a word not only in its movement but in its scope, its whole-
ness, its simultaneity. Vygotsky compared thought with an
overhanging cloud pouring out a shower of words.
This disparity between thought and word accounts for the ob-
servation that it is sometimes difficult to find a word to express a
thought or one that will “fit” a thought. In this case a person be-
gins to think, but is unable to pursue his thinking; thought runs
dry; the person is unable to get a clear purchase on his thought,
that is, to convey it with word meaning. No wonder, then, that this
process of mediation is the most essential aspect of verbal thought.6
At first, this mediated meaning is minimally distinct (sense);
 MAY–JUNE/JULY–AUGUST 2003 63

later it becomes more stable and general (word meaning in the

narrow sense).7
Thought, however, is not the last plane of verbal thought. The
last and deepest plane of verbal thought is the motive. As Vygotsky
observes, “A thought is not engendered by another thought, but by
motivation, i.e., our desires and needs, our interests and impulses,
our affects and emotions. . . . A true and full understanding of
another’s thought is possible only when we understand its actual,
its affective-volitional basis” (1956, p. 379).
Below is a quotation from Vygotsky, a passage in which he con-
cludes his examination of the inner levels of verbal thinking.
We have come to the end of our analysis. Let us survey its results. Verbal
thought appeared to us to be a complex, dynamic entity, and the relation
between thought and word within it, a movement through a series of
planes. Our analysis followed the process from the outermost to the
innermost plane. In reality, the development of verbal thought takes the
opposite course: from the motive that engenders a thought to the formu-
lation of the thought, first in inner speech, then in meanings of words,
and, finally, in words. (Vygotsky, 1953, pp. 380–81)
Schematically, this process may be depicted as follows (see
Figure 1).
Thus, according to Vygotsky, every thought is engendered by a
conflict: it resolves a problem by connecting one thing with an-
other. The terms of this problem, which are set by the subject’s
preceding activity, his affective-volitional dispositions, and his
personality in general, define some internal situation. To find a
solution, a way out of the conflict entails rethinking at least one of
the components of the situation and the formation of new associa-
tions. As a result, the situation as a whole is transformed in the
subject’s mind and a “picture of the result” emerges. Since the
internal situation absorbs the whole individual, it is always totally
unique and subjectively concrete; and since this concreteness is un-
bounded, the situation always has some degree of indeterminacy
about it. The definition of the whole situation is focused on what is
“new” or unveiled in the solution of the situational conflict. The
64 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

Figure 1. [Vygotsky’s Levels in the Process of Verbal Thinking]

Motive

Formulation
of a thought

Thought

Mediation of a
thought via the
inner word

Inner speech

Mediation via the meaning

of external words

Semantic plane

Modification of the semantic structure

when it is embodied in words, transition
from the syntax of meanings to verbal
syntax

External speech

“new” that has been singled out of the situation has direct signifi-
cance; it can therefore be designated. This designation becomes
the “name” of the situation as a whole, that is, the implied subject,
the situation, has a first predicate that comes to represent the situ-
ation, has a first predicate that comes to represent the situation as
a whole. Thus, the linguistic meaning selected to fix the thought
absorbs the situation and becomes a situational meaning, that is,
sense. In this way meaning comes to convey a content that goes
far beyond its limits. This new conflict, which is now verbal, is
resolved as speech unfolds.
This takes place through a comparison of the distorted sense
 MAY–JUNE/JULY–AUGUST 2003 65

content of a meaning with objective linguistic meanings. This pro-

cess, this dialogue between thought and word, constitutes the ba-
sic content of the inner-speech stage. It is a process of reflection in
which the “new,” once named, is transformed into something “old,”
and is subject in turn to differentiation and naming. Situationally
deformed meaning, that is, sense, is freed from its situational con-
straints by the discovery of new combinations and new structures
of meanings. In turn, combining meanings anew alters and dis-
torts static lexical meanings, enabling them to express living
thought. This movement toward a limit results in a situation in
which all the essential content that the first internal word stands
for is wholly used up, being transfused into the structure of objec-
tive meanings; and this word itself becomes a mere copula, a cen-
ter of gravity around which numerous predicates of different orders
accumulate. Thus, inner speech is responsible for the predicative
development, the integrity, and the coherence of every utterance,
no matter how broad in scope.
We see from this description of the inner-speech stage that it
comprises both phases in the construction of an utterance in which
inner words function, for example, the phase of transition from a
thought to the level of inner speech, and the phase from it to the
semantic level.
In both these phases the meaning of the forthcoming utterance
is still in the process of being constructed, a process that culmi-
nates in the transition to the semantic level. The speaker at this
point is already dealing with the structures of objective meanings;
Vygotsky calls these structures semantic structures. They are con-
structed according to the rules of psychological syntax, the syntax
of thought.8
The transition from the semantic plane to external speech pre-
supposes a process of “modification of the sense structure as it is
embodied in words” and—what is especially important for our pur-
poses—“a transition from the syntax of meaning to verbal syntax”
(Vygotsky, 1956, p. 335).
Let us review why it is important for us to remember that
66 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

Vygotsky pointed out the necessity of having the transition from

semantic syntax, the syntax of meanings, to verbal syntax. We have
reviewed Vygotsky’s ideas in order to answer one question: What
position does inner speech occupy in the process of speech pro-
duction, and what role does it play in the grammatical formation
of an utterance? We find the answer to this question in Vygotsky’s
notion that “There are two processes of syntactic formation, one
for the creation of the syntax of sense and one for the creation of
external speech syntax.” The first has to do with the rules for the
expansion of sense, and its end result is the semantic structures
with psychological subjects and predicates of the semantic stage.
External speech syntax is governed by the rules of the particular
language of the speaker; and in accordance with these rules, se-
mantic structures are transformed into surface forms, grammati-
cally correct sentences.
Before we attempt to interpret our knowledge of aphasia in
the light of these concepts, it will be useful to review some con-
temporary psycholinguistic and linguistic notions concerning the
mechanisms underlying language and to see how they relate to
Vygotsky’s ideas.

Vygotsky’s view and contemporary models of

speech production

It is significant that contemporary models of speech production

are in many respects similar to the one offered by Vygotsky in
1934. Some of the most important points of similarity are, first,
the idea that “There are two syntaxes—sense syntax and external
speech syntax” (Vygotsky, 1968, p. 188) and second, the idea that
there is a special semantic structure of inner speech that does not
coincide with the external structure.
These ideas, which have been extensively used by contempo-
rary linguistics, have not been borrowed from psychology.
Chomsky (1957) was the first to offer the idea that there were two
levels to the syntactic organization of a sentence. In his search for
a model that would generate grammatically correct sentences,
 MAY–JUNE/JULY–AUGUST 2003 67

Chomsky came to the conclusion that such a model had to be based

on a transformational principle. The generation of the syntactic
structure would then consist of two stages: first, the deep structure
of a sentence is formed, establishing the most important, deep syn-
tactical properties of the sentence; then this structure is transformed
by special rules, transformations, into a surface structure, which
reflects the surface syntactic properties of the sentence.
The American psychologist George Miller proposed a hypoth-
esis about the “psychological reality” of Chomsky’s model. The
results of the first experiments were interpreted as a confirmation
of the reality of these transformations. When they adopted a more
rigorous approach to the interpretation of initial and subsequent
experiments, however, investigators were obliged to concede that
although the experiments did not refute the reality of the transfor-
mational model, they nevertheless did make clear that this model
could not explain all the empirically observed facts and required
additional explanatory factors (e.g., the reversibility factor, pointed
out by Dan Slobin).9
In his analysis of empirical studies to verify the transformational
model and other models (Osgood’s model, and immediate constitu-
ent model), the Soviet psycholinguist A.A. Leontiev came to the
conclusion that all these experiments could be easily interpreted in
terms of a general model based essentially on Vygotsky’s concept
of speech production. Leontiev pointed out that the empirical data
accumulated by psycholinguistics could be explained if the speech
production model included a stage of pregrammatical organization
of an utterance corresponding to the inner-speech stage in Vygotsky’s
concept. Moreover, the inclusion of this stage would also provide a
real basis for theoretical notions concerning the mechanisms of vol-
untary activity that have emerged from the work of Soviet and for-
eign psychologists and physiologists over the past few decades.
Pursuing the line of reasoning of these scientists, the most no-
table of which are A.N. Leontiev, N.A. Bernshtein, P.K. Anokhin,
G. Miller, E. Galanter, and K. Pribram, A.A. Leontiev views a
verbal utterance as a speech act within a broader analysis of activ-
ity [deiatel’nost’ ] featuring such characteristics as motivation,
68 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

purposefulness, a three-stage structure (formulation of a plan, imple-

mentation of the plan, and comparison of the result with the plan),
and a hierarchical organization. Accordingly, any speech act, being
motivated and purposeful, consists of programming, implementa-
tion of a program, and comparison of the program with the results.
This interpretation of a speech act makes it possible to distinguish
between the substantive aspect (determined by the goal of the act)
and the operational aspect (determined by the conditions of the act)
of a speech act. The substantive aspect of a speech act (or any other
act) is what is programmed. This program includes the aspects of
the act that control its implementation yet are independent of this
implementation (see A.A. Leontiev, 1969, pp. 151–53).
A.A. Leontiev proposed that “The phenomenon often referred
to as inner speech and preceding an external utterance corresponds
to the stage we call the plan (programming) of a speech act” (A.A.
Leontiev, 1969, p. 221).
This stage, which Leontiev calls inner programming, occupies
a central place in the structure of a speech act. This structure is
depicted schematically in Figure 2.
As is evident from this figure, the first stage in the construction
of an utterance is a motive. Motivation gives rise to a speech inten-
tion. “At this stage, the speaker has a picture of the result (George
Miller and others), but does not yet have a plan of action he must
carry out to produce this result” (Leontiev and Ryabova, 1970,
p. 28). The next stage is the inner-program stage. In the book
quoted above (1970, p. 29), it is stated that this stage corresponds
to Vygotsky’s “conveyance of a thought in an internal word.” At
this stage the speech intention is conveyed by a code of personal
senses (in Leontiev’s definition),10 which recrystallized in some sub-
jective code units (“a code of images and schemata,” N.I. Zhinkin),11
although these units are, of course, the result of internalization of
objective external actions.
In describing the characteristics of this stage in detail A.A.
Leontiev observes that the program fixes the content of an entire
verbal whole as well as of individual utterances. The result of
programming is a system of predicative utterances coded in inner
 MAY–JUNE/JULY–AUGUST 2003 69

Figure 2. [Structure of a Speech Act]

Motive

Thought (speech intention)

Inner programming

Lexical expansion Grammatical construction

Motor implementation

External speech

speech. The latter, the surface level of the program, that is, the
program of the most imminent utterance, contains the correlates
of the principal substantive components of the utterance, that is,
the subject, object, and predicate. These components are linked by
content and sense. Leontiev draws on Vygotsky’s notion of psy-
chological syntax in interpreting this link and considers that the
syntax of the inner program actually determines the way a sen-
tence is put together.
In the construction of a verbal utterance, inner programming
not only expands the semantic content (the planning function) but
also does the opposite: it compresses a system of objective linguis-
tic meanings into an inner schema. This is a necessary function for
comparing the results of the speech act with the intention behind it.
The program is used as a basis for further lexical-grammatical
development, as a basis for comparison, and as a means for fixing
70 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

the preceding and upcoming content of the utterance. For all these
purposes, a program must be preserved (memory).
Inner programming participates in speech perception in a simi-
lar fashion (with the positions of compression and development
reversed).
In discussing the next stage (lexical-grammatical development),
A.A. Leontiev points out that the mechanisms responsible for pro-
ducing a syntactical construction, on the one hand, and for its lexi-
cal “filling,” on the other, are fundamentally different. Whereas
the first of these mechanisms is constructive (the model of the
grammatical generation of an utterance is definitely not a Markov
model), the second is basically probabilistic and operates on the
principle of unique linear cumulation. The psychological autonomy
of each of these mechanisms has been demonstrated by, in par-
ticular, D. Howes (A.A. Leontiev, 1969, p. 267).
These mechanisms operate jointly, and they result in a lexico-
grammatical development of the program. This stage is followed
by a stage of motor implementation. Thus, we have seen the cur-
rent interpretation given to Vygotsky’s concept in psycholinguistics.
At the same time as this psycholinguistic research was being car-
ried out, work was also being done in linguistics itself to arrive at
a critical understanding of Chomsky’s theory. Chomsky’s syntac-
tical model has been criticized mainly because it fails to address
semantic problems. Its revision has focused on creating models
that take the semantics of utterances into account.
In this research, particularly in research on machine transla-
tion, notions about the semantic nature of the deep structure and
the notion that the deep structure lexicon has unique characteris-
tics have been advanced and further developed (Zholkovskii and
Mel’chuk, 1965, 1967, 1969; Katsnel’son, 1972; Gak, 1968, 1969;
Fillmore, 1968; Chafe, 1970; Lakoff, 1971).
We see that although they have pursued their separate ways, psy-
chology and linguistics have arrived at a common view, namely,
that the construction of an utterance occurs on many levels, each of
which has its own “lexicon” and its own special rules for joining the
 MAY–JUNE/JULY–AUGUST 2003 71

lexical items, that is, its own syntax. Thus, Vygotsky’s notion of
two types of syntax agrees with contemporary notions of the struc-
ture of the speech process.

Formulating hypotheses for experimental research

An examination of the current state of the theory of speech ac-

tivity has brought us to the view that a speech act has a complex
and multistaged structure. Following Vygotsky and Leontiev, we
have postulated that two aspects must be distinguished in the
construction of an utterance: inner programming and grammati-
cal structuring, the first of which provides the semantic structure
of the utterance, and the second, its grammatical structure.
This difference must also be taken into account in an analysis of
speech disorders. We have accordingly advanced two hypotheses:
1. There are two fundamentally different types of dynamic apha-
sia: the first is caused by a disorder in the formation of the psycho-
logical schema of an utterance (the inner programming); the second,
by a disorder in the grammatical structuring.
2. Both types of dynamic aphasia differ from efferent motor
aphasia, whose mechanism involves the breakdown of the kinetic
organization of a speech act (i.e., one of the operations of external
verbalization)12 and a disorder in grammatical structuring.
3. The agrammaticism accompanying both the second type of
dynamic aphasia and efferent motor aphasia has one thing in com-
mon: a disorder of grammatical structuring.
The fundamental difference between our hypotheses and the
current view of the mechanisms underlying these types of aphasia
is that we distinguish between disorders in inner programming
and in grammatical structuring. The focus of our study, therefore,
was to ascertain whether either of these operations could be pri-
marily affected independently of the other.
Our assumption in making these hypotheses was that if we could
demonstrate that our explanation of the mechanisms underlying
these forms of aphasia was correct, we would also have proved
72 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

that our notion of the mechanisms underlying the construction of

utterance (on which our hypotheses were based) also described a
certain reality.
To test these hypotheses we chose two approaches: a neuropsy-
chological one, and a psycholinguistic one. The first was necessary
because we had to study the failure of certain operations within an
integral psychological function, and a neuropsychological analysis
is made to order for this, since the methods Luria has developed for
neuropsychological research enable one to pinpoint the operation
primarily affected within the overall picture of the disorder.
The second approach was selected because psycholinguistics
has developed detailed methods for analyzing a text, and disor-
ders in operations such as grammatical structuring and inner pro-
gramming must show up in a text that a speaker produces. These
two approaches we call psycholinguistic or, more precisely,
neurolinguistic, inasmuch as we interpret the results of our analy-
sis in terms of whether or not some particular speech operation or
operations are still intact.

Notes

1. For more details, see the next section.

2. This idea may also be found in the book by Tsvetkova and Shagi (1969).
3. A phase refers to the transition from one level to another.
4. Differences between the two levels also show up in the fact that they do not
develop in parallel in children. A child’s initial utterances are word-sentences in
which the two levels are completely fused. They then develop in opposite direc-
tions. The external speech aspect develops from the part to the whole: from the
word to the sentence and to expanded speech. “In the development of the seman-
tic aspect of speech, the child begins with a whole sentence, and only later begins
to master the separate semantic units, the meanings of particular words, and to
differentiate his diffuse thought, expressed in a one-word sentence, into a num-
ber of individual verbal meanings, all interconnected” (1956, p. 331).
5. See the view of P.A. Florenskii, who distinguished the universally obliga-
tory external form and the individual inner form of a word (Florenskii, 1973).
6. This view of the role of mediation distinguishes Vygotsky from the
Wurzburg school, with their pure thought. Vygotsky wrote: “Direct communica-
tion between minds is impossible not only physically but psychologically. It
can be achieved only in a roundabout way; thought must pass first through
meanings and then through words” (1956, p. 379).
 MAY–JUNE/JULY–AUGUST 2003 73

7. Following Vygotsky we use the term “meaning” here in two senses. In the
broad sense, the meaning of a word is contrasted to the external-speech aspect of
a word and combines meaning and sense (see Vygotsky, 1956, p. 369); in the
narrow sense it is contrasted to sense, that is, subjectively distorted meaning.
Consider: “Inner speech is to a considerable extent thinking with pure mean-
ings” (1956, p. 376) and the assertion that “The sense of a word predominates
over meaning in inner speech” (1956, p. 369).
8. Vygotsky’s notion of sense structure should not be confused with the notion
of sense structure used in contemporary linguistics. If we were to try to find a
linguistic concept that corresponded to psychological sense structure, it would be
most nearly the deep syntactic structure of the model “Sense Ù Text.”
9. See A.A. Leontiev, 1969, pp. 99–111, for a more detailed criticism of the
transformational model of speech production.
10. A.N. Leontiev has refined Vygotsky’s concept of the term “sense” by
introducing it into the conceptual system of the theory of activity (see A.N.
Leontiev, 1947; 1965, pp. 286–92).
11. In other works A.N. Leontiev emphasizes the fact that the characteristics
of a code may vary within very broad limits: the code may be the derivative of
external speech in Vygotsky’s sense, or a code of inner security images and sche-
mata, which N.I. Zhinkin (1960, 1964, 1967) discovered empirically.
12. The choice of phonemes on the basis of kinesthetic features is what we
consider the second operation of external verbalization (see T.V. Ryabova
[Akhutiva], 1967).

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