ABSTRACT
The American novelist, philosopher, and physician Walker Percy has analyzed a classic example of the transformation of inner speech into thought represented by symbol internalization, the celebrated case of Helen Keller, a deaf and blind child in Alabama at the end of the last century, who was able to overcome a sightless and soundless existence to acquire the capacity to read and write and even to master a halting form of speech, which she herself could not hear. The Soviet psychologist L.S. Vygotsky observed in very young children that overt speech frequently accompanies their actions. Vygotsky proposed that inner and external speech perform radically different functions. Inner speech serves the ego in thinking; outer speech serves in social relations. Furth provided some independent confirmation of the importance of the social context to thinking through his investigations of deaf children. Vygotsky insisted on the importance of the social environment in the development of a signal system of cognition.
