Why this Question? Commentary on Vivona

Jeanine Vivona has presented us a well-documented selection of the copious research findings from academic studies on early language development over the past fifty years. Aware that results are constrained by both the question asked and the research method used in answer, she is more careful than many writers in presenting these findings, not extrapolating generalities about global capacities beyond what a specific study actually demonstrates. Nevertheless, the findings can be summarized as soundly establishing the human infant’s aural-processing proclivity for human voices in its environment, a proclivity which, present even before birth, must be built upon an innate endowment, the parameters of which linguists and neuroscientists seek to discover. From that established platform, she then asks if parental speech impacts the infant’s emerging linguistic competence, and if emerging linguistic competence permeates the infant’s inner world of concepts and feelings. She concludes from the research that, indeed, the answer to both questions is yes. The implications for psychoanalysis are not trivial: our intrapsychic world is jointly constituted from the start.

If the infant is from the beginning parsing out distinctive patterns that are meaningful in the ambient language environment, then those distinctions must be implicated in all other categories of learning taking place during the first two years of life, a span often cited in the psychoanalytic literature as the “preverbal period.” To propose otherwise is to claim that the child masters its language apart from all other experiences, as a separate line of development or perhaps as genetically preprogrammed, such that competency emerges independently during the child’s third year—in other words, that cognitive or social learning proceeds during the first years of life independent of language. It is precisely this thesis that Vivona calls into question by marshaling the research findings on the effects of adult speech on language learning and concept formation. On the basis of these findings, Vivona asks her final question: Then, should we really continue to claim the existence of a preverbal period? Her answer is a resounding no.

Does anyone doubt that we are all born into a particular cultural community, constituted through its various signifying systems—chief among which is language—by means of which our individual subjectivity is established? Each subjectivity begins before conception with the cultural significance of a child (e.g., a child of a particular gender, in a particular birth order, at a particular time) and then continues after conception in parental fantasies of who their child will be, etc. So, by the time the infant arrives, established practices and routines are already in place that will determine how he or she will be handled and spoken to, what expectations will be made, and so forth. Again, to claim otherwise is to assume the arrival of a tabula rasa that only gradually, either through emergent natural competencies or environmental conditioning, becomes a human being (Litowitz 2005). What is at stake in the two positions, as in the earlier oppositions regarding language acquisition, is one’s theory of mind.

During the course of my training as a linguist, I straddled the pre- and post-Chomsky eras, thereby experiencing firsthand a major paradigm shift regarding theory of mind. Further, I saw how a reigning paradigm determines the questions and the permissible methodology for seeking answers. For example, during the reign of behaviorism, it was claimed that the acquisition of all knowledge and behavior (including speech and language) followed a single form of learning in which environmental input was the determining factor, demonstrated by a parallel methodology of environmental manipulation (e.g., different conditions and variables). The collapse of that paradigm ushered in the cognitive era of everything flowing from the child’s natural endowment, if only the environment remains neutral-to-facilitating (i.e., does not impede the “natural” tendency toward growth and development). Its attendant methodology favored introspection and natural observations. However, as George Miller famously noted, then we had two paradigms, one of which was impossible, the other miraculous (Bruner 1983, p. 34). Our currently dominant paradigm might be labeled “social”; its focus is on the interplay between innate endowment and environmental context. ¹

Based on these academic experiences, I recently examined how shifting paradigms in psychoanalysis have led to the privileging of behavioral and visual research data over the oral-aural findings that Vivona cites (Litowitz 2011a). I suggested that the concept of preverbal infancy is a consequence of choosing a particular paradigm and methodology and represents a particular theory of mind. Specifically, that theory of mind proposes a sharp divide between infancy and childhood for which the emergence of language at around age two serves as the Rubicon. That theory of mind, in turn, determines what questions to ask (e.g., What is the nature of cognition and interpersonal relations formed in the absence of language? What is the effect of language on these earlier states of mind? How does one know another’s mind in the absence of shared mediation?) and leads directly to the challenging question of Vivona’s title.

“Preverbal” indicates a “time before words,” but words are first encountered as sound patterns that separate themselves out of noise (i.e., unpatterned sound in general) because they have meaning. That is, sounds do not have significance in the ambient language simply because patterns are repeated. Cocks crowing (dogs barking, birds singing) are sound patterns repeated in nature but have no significance until we learn how those patterns should sound in our language: Cock-a-doodle-do or coquerico or kikeriki. All speech patterns gain significance because they are uttered in activities and practices with another person for whom they already have significance. Those activities include feeding, bathing, playing, regulating affect states, and directing attention, but—significantly—not teaching language. Speech and other sign systems (such as gestures, body movements, facial expressions, songs) are simply part of these activities. Nor are children little linguists, learning language from its constituent parts, although it may appear to an outside observer that each child is on a purposeful grammatical program: building up from sounds (phonology); combined into words (morphology); linearly strung in sentences (syntax).

Because of his earlier writing on speech and language loss (On Aphasia), Freud (1891) had a nuanced conception of speech, even speculating on language acquisition, which he presented briefly in 1915 as “Words and Things” in Appendix C to “The Unconscious.” He correctly perceived that the key to understanding speech lies in the acoustic image but, also, that an acoustic image is complex. He notes that “in a motor respect, the ‘word’ is doubly determined for us” (p. 210): we hear and we speak and, in speaking, we hear ourselves. This aural-oral circuitry consists of multiple distinct images (mnemic traces). Each utterance (by ourselves or others) is a singularity: for example, every utterance of the sound [b] is unique. But out of the token experiences the infant quickly establishes a category or type /b/—an abstract phonological concept that differentiates meanings in the ambient language (/bit/ vs. /pit/). ² At every level of a language system (prosodic contours, sound, words, sentences), the abstract category is significant only by virtue of its difference in relation to all others at that level. ³ Thus we often hear the axiom “language consists only of differences,” but what establishes difference is meaning. These systematic differences and their permissible combinations are what it means to know a language. With only minimal exposure to the ambient language, children acquire these abstractions very quickly and early, long before they can be expressed in speech. In normal children, receptive language competence always precedes and exceeds expression in speech, which requires controlling and coordinating muscles and breathing.

This aspect of signification or meaning enters into an infant’s world long before a second aspect of signification: the use of words to designate objects in the world. However, the concept of meaning or semantics is often reduced to this single aspect of signification as if, like Adam in Genesis, language consists only in attaching verbal labels to objects in the world. Nevertheless, it is worth remembering, as Vivona points out, that even this aspect begins earlier than some psychoanalytic theorists have proposed.

An abstract language system of meaningful distinctions is shared. ⁴ Given that language is shared and to the degree that language shapes mind, we should think of mind as distributed. To claim that we are intersubjective from the start, then, changes the question we ask from “How is intersubjectivity established?” to “What factors influence changes in intersubjectivity over time?” Initially intersubjectivity is largely in the mind of the adult; what processes can be identified in the course of development such that the child is increasingly an equal participant with the adult? We know that the caretaker uses the child’s ready attunement to significant prosodic patterns to regulate its affect states, including focusing attention. We know that focused attention becomes joint attention, through which intentionality can be shared; and that shared intentionality continues processes of identification that began earlier in imitation. We know that acquiring new forms of negation allows the child to express an emerging subjectivity and expanding sense of self (Litowitz 2011b). Ready to engage in actual dialogue, the child now uses intonation patterns as sentential markers to distinguish the major sentential patterns: statements, questions, and commands. In other words, the tools that language provides create and mark changes in the relationships between self and others even as they bind us intrapsychically to one another (Litowitz 2005).

A focus on the sharing of mind through verbal mediation does not deny or denigrate two important facts. First, we each learn a shared language under individual circumstances, and those unique experiences (tokens) remain with us.

Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike [Quine 1960, p. 8].

It is precisely the “twigs” (i.e., tokens) that we encounter in the transference and that we seek out in associations, dreams, and enactments. We never stop learning our language, so this process continues throughout our lives, as we know from our analysts’ and teachers’ voices that continue to inhabit us, joining those from the past (Smith 2001).

Second, our experiences are not limited to what is captured by our language: the world exists apart from and in excess of language. ⁵ However, it is only through language (I would argue) that our inner world, shaped through communicational exchanges with others, can be brought into communication with others, now sharable in a way that can be discussed (i.e., brought into joint attention and reference), negotiated, and altered. Elsewhere I have addressed the ambiguities inherent in these processes due to the inevitable entanglement of minds, both in development (Litowitz 2005, 2011a) and in analysis (Litowitz 2007).

Communicational exchange is synonymous with life (Olds 2000). It is impossible to not communicate, though only a small portion of communication is intentional. ⁶ Consequently, interpreting and knowing (i.e., meaning-making) is ubiquitous and continuous, but only a small part is conscious. I believe that across the many psychoanalytic perspectives, despite differing theories of mind, all approaches would depend on the use of language to reach a shared understanding between analyst and patient. Of all sign systems that communicate, only language has the necessary properties of self-reference (i.e., the use of language to refer to language) and shared generalities learned uniquely (i.e., /types/ [token]) that enable us to reengage the joint attention→reference→intentionality sequence I have described.

Psychoanalysis was founded on Freud’s stressing the importance of attention to consciousness and the role of language in raising-into- consciousness the memories, affects, thoughts, ideas, etc. that have been variously negated (Brenner 2006, p. 120). The differences among psychoanalytic theories are not over whether we are all engaged in talk therapies but, rather, over our theories of mind. Under discussion here is one major difference in this respect: does a mind develop in the infant alone, based on his actions and the reactions of others, or is mind intersubjective and semiotically mediated from the start?

If the child is extracting meaningful patterns from its environment visually and behaviorally, why would one expect vocal sounds to be exempt? Or, why would one assume that language arrives only later to clothe (or distort) cognition and personal relations already established through other means? One reason may be a long Western tradition that identifies language with words or verbal labels and language acquisition as the application of names to preexisting objects and concepts. For example, here is St. Augustine’s account of how he learned language:

I remember this, and I afterwards observed how I first learned to speak, for my elders did not teach me words in any set method, as they did letters afterwards; but I myself, when I was unable to say all I wished and to whomsoever I desired, by means of the whimperings and broken utterances and various motions of my limbs, which I used to enforce my wishes, repeated the sounds in my memory by the mind, O my God, which Thou gavest me. When they called anything by name, and moved the body towards it while they spoke, I saw and gathered that the thing they wished to point out was called by the name they then uttered; and that they did mean this was made plain by the motion of the body, even by the natural language of all nations expressed by the countenance, glance of the eye, movement of other members, and by the sound of the voice indicating the affections of the mind, as it seeks, possesses, rejects, or avoids. So it was that by frequently hearing words, in duly placed sentences, I gradually gathered what things they were the signs of, and having formed my mouth to the utterance of those signs, I thereby expressed my will. Thus I exchanged with those about me the signs by which we express our wishes, and advanced deeper into the stormy fellowship of human life, depending the while on the authority of parents, and the beck of elders. [Confessions, Book 1, Chapter 8]. ⁷

This is the frequently encountered perspective of a lone child who, solely through his own agency, builds his subjectivity by encountering the agency of another.

Alternatively, I have argued that it is not so simple to separate out our wishes from our demands, nor these from the wishes and demands of others (Litowitz 2005). When prosodic patterns that first regulate affect states are the same ones that express truths (statements) and make demands (commands), how can one know for sure what one does think and feel, as distinct from what one ought to think and feel? Among psychoanalysts, Loewald was a harbinger of this alternative paradigm. As early as 1960 he wrote about the self-with-other system, drawing parallels between child-with-caregiver and patient-with-analyst systems. He described how the child’s or patient’s worlds are not directly encountered but rather are mediated by the caregiver or analyst. And he noted the role of language as instrument of mediation. Consequently, it is not surprising that he advocated jettisoning the preverbal/verbal divide in development, recommending instead that we seek out the various ways mediation functions in these systems as they develop (Loewald 1977).

The question asked in Vivona’s title enlists our joint attention and sets a topic that establishes a referent: the nature of mind in infancy. Hopefully, a dialogue has begun that will generate new questions: Is mind unmediated or mediated? What is the relation between agency and subjectivity? How does the child’s growing competence in cultural forms of mediation affect both her inner world and her relations to others? How do processes first apparent in child-caregiver systems reappear in patient-analyst systems?