ABSTRACT
Regardless of the numerous differences existing among languages, they share the property of being verbal articulated means of communication. Additionally, there are nonverbal gestural languages. The use of signs or gestures instead of or in addition to verbal language should also be included in our attempt to understand language’s role in cognitive development. The languages spoken by man are indeed varied and differ on a number of dimensions including the richness, precision, and complexity of their vocabularies, the organization of meaning, grammatical structure, and so on. Comparison of the level of intellectual functioning (even with nonverbal tests) of children and adults from undeveloped societies with those from Western civilizations demonstrate significant deficits in the former group in relation to the latter. Discussions of the consequences of speaking one language instead of another are relatively old.
