Yes; IIRC she even referred to it as a “time of no thought”. Then again, she lacked both images and language as a tool to think with; logically she was worse off than someone who just lacked language.
This. While it’s certainly possible to think visually, it’s nearly impossible to write without words. “Nearly” impossible, because a nice, loose defintion of writing is, “marking the environment as a means of communicating.” I dare you to turn that in. 
Also, if a bear jumps out from behind a tree and expresses a sincere desire to eat you, you’re going to know exactly what to do even though you can’t come up with a word that means, “RUN!”
Here’s a story of a man who was born deaf and didn’t learn sign language until he was fully grown. I’d guess he was capable of thought before that.
iirc, Helen had some language - not only did someone teach her a little bit of sign, but she wasn’t born deaf and blind. The move The Miracle Worker may have been a little Anne-is-the-Savior-heavy. A major thing with Helen is that she grew up exposed to language in various forms, and she wasn’t without company.
I* think *the universal response is, “GAAAAAAAH! – :eek:”
Oh, I’m sure he wouldn’t. He certainly does now have a concept of language, and can communicate, and can attest that it profoundly affected the way he perceives and thinks about the world… but he just as certainly will never have the ability to sign, and possibly, think, like he would have if he had learned as a child.
The Radiolab episode also touched briefly on the case (which I’m sure you’re familiar with, CitizenPained) of the kids in Nicaragua who developed their own sign language, which was learned and elaborated on by the subsequent generations of kids in the school. In the episode, they talked about the differences in the way various generations of kids thought, as evidenced by what they talked (signed) about and how they said it. Specifically, the kids who learned the language at a younger age seemed to demonstrate the ability to deal with more complex concepts (like the minds of others) than those who learned when they were older. And interestingly, they showed that in some - though not all - cases, the “kids” in the older generations were able to learn from the younger ones when they started interacting more, and were able to think and talk in more advanced ways than they could before.
It’s impossible not to wonder whether (and if so, to what degree) someone who grew up with no language is *actually *mentally stunted, versus merely seeming that way, because they have no way to convey their ideas, or to receive others’ ideas.
Sorry, missed this on preview.
Actually, we don’t know. This was the same guy I mentioned above, who worked with Susan Schaller.
[QUOTE=Susan Schaller on Radiolab]
But the interesting thing that [noparse][Ildefonso][/noparse] said is that he can’t even think that way anymore. He said he can’t think the way he used to think and when I pushed him to ask about what it was like to be languageless, the closest he ever came to any kind of an answer was exactly that. I don’t know, I don’t remember. I think differently now.
[/QUOTE]
If you listen to her tell his story, it’s clear that he was capable of some thought before that, but his way of thinking has changed so significantly that he can no longer communicate with his old (still languageless) friends. So you really have to define “thought” first - and even then, it’s pretty tricky to determine what’s going on (or not) in people’s heads without using language. The program did talk about a few ways that researchers are approaching that problem, but it’s very complex.
I love. This. Case.
It shows us so many things - that kids are resilient, that language is natural, that sign is natural, that kids who grow up in language-rich environments should have the world at their fingertips, deaf or not…
There seems to be some different ideas on why that is so, beyond the usual ‘can’t sign like a native that late in the game’ meme. I think it’s the social aspect of language. There are many cues and nuances that kids pick up before they’re even speaking fluently (fluent is around age 5-6). Kids will make plurals, understand genders, create past tense, figure out the use of articles, etc. I feel the “Big Ideas” of language are because we interact with each other with language. A kid growing up hearing may say, “Well, I went to the store yesterday and I bought a soda, but then I forgot the soda at the counter and I had to go back and get it,” and one without would be struggling to put the parts of speech together in the ‘proper’ order and come up with. “Store I go yesterday no have soda go back” or something.
I kind of agree. It’s all relative. Such and such a person may not do algebra on paper, but could still figure out, Well if A is less than B…
wanderlust
Language can’t be invented without thinking about it.
Ergo, the very existence of language tells us that people can think without language.
At a guess, they think in terms of objects being moved around and so on, and mental pictures of those objects.
While it would probably be difficult to prove, and I might be more wrong than I realize - when I am programming, most of the thought seems to be abstract and non-language - the actual typed code is a translation from the work behind the scenes of organizing and solving the problem.
There’s a fun experiment you can do that demonstrates this (called the Stroop Effect).
Get a bunch of crayons and first write a list of color words using the same crayon that is the color of the word. Go down the list and say out loud the names of the colors that the words are written in. Now write the same list of color words using crayons that are not that color. Then go down the list and say out loud the names of the colors that the words are written in. See which list takes you longer to read.
Hell, I’ll do it here with text color:
List #1
Blue
Green
Black
Red
Brown
Blue
Red
(You should have said out loud, “Blue, green, black, red, brown, blue, red.”)
List #2
Red
Brown
Green
Blue
Black
Green
Black
(You should have said out loud, “Blue, green, black, red, brown, blue, red.”)
Most people will be slower at saying the colors in the second list.
ASL was derived from French Sign Language, and was never based on spoken english. It has been influenced by spoken english, but the grammar is completely different.
There have been efforts to create Signed English, which mostly amount to taking ASL signs and using English grammar, adding signs for accessory words used in English but not ASL, and initializations to indicate the exact english synonym you mean (big vs huge vs giant for example).
Brain injury victims like Gabby Giffords get injuries to the speech center of the brain.
From what I’ve heard, it also affected her ability to write. Supposedly she still reads but no one from her staff has admitted yet at what level or how badly impaired her reading comprehension is.
The speech center of the brain is obviously very critical for more than just talking.
Not true; inventing language appears to be instinctive in humans. For example in the incident referred to above a bunch of kids created their own sign language. All it took was for enough kids to be placed in the same place for long enough without a pre-existing language; lacking such a language they made one.
Others have addressed it already but I’ll chime in with a couple of points.
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Obviously yes but it’s of a different quality than with language. (already mentioned)
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Dreaming, and drug trips, and magnetic cranial stimulation, can all create experiences that stimulate brain areas that have nothing to do with language.
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Yes language affects mental algorithms. Regardless of the controversy over the Eskimo “snow” issue, definitely the tendency to separate the world into labeled categories creates a qualitative difference.
TLDR: language doesn’t create thinking but it does create an experiential difference similar to the difference between a music video and a vh1 pop up video.
Excellent example. The most annoying thing in the world to me is when I’m working on a software project, and someone comes over either to offer me advice or to ask what I’m doing. Switching from “coding mode” to “verbal mode” causes me to forget what I’m doing, and it takes at least several minutes to get my mind back to where it was.
As a computer scientist myself, this is very much how I think when coding as well. I’m definitely not thinking in words, but as objects, processes, and data structures.
Similarly, as a musician, particularly when I’m composing, there’s no language involved. I’m thinking of the structure of the piece, scales, times, all that sort of stuff.
In fact, a lot of my thought is more in a conceptual way like that, and I end up having to try to come up with analogies or ways to transcribe those concepts into language, which often fails.
Exactly. I’ve often thought through what an editor would look like that more closely models what is going on inside my brain - with abstract thoughts that resemble pictures at times - it would make some aspects a quicker translation and in some cases bugs would become much more apparent.
I know there are people that have tried to create “picture” style representations of algorithms, but it’s always rudimentary and not really a good mapping to the view inside the head.
The right half of the brain has no language at all. It does a great deal of thinking though. Figuring out how to put a puzzle together, for example, is right-brained thinking. Color, shape, spatial relationships, the map in your head that gets you home even though you probably couldn’t give somebody else directions on how to get there - that sort of thing.
Most people have had thoughts that they have trouble expressing in words. How would this be possible if thought were impossible without language?
As mentioned by others in this thread, there are realms of thought for which language seems unnecessary, and may be a hindrance. Spatial reasoning, for example - does a cabinet maker use language when putting together a rolltop desk? Does a photographer use language when figuring out how to frame a picture?
The OP is looking for arguments that thought is impossible without language, but these are hard to come up with because, as I see it, it’s just not true. I see no reason to believe that our mental processes use language as their internal processing mechanism. As I remember, Steven Pinker says as much in one of his books (possibly How the Mind Works).