Introduction by James V. Wertsch to "Thinking as Creation (Introduction to the Logic of Mental Dialogue)"

Abstract

Since the publication of Vygotsky's Thinking and speech in 1934, relatively little has been written about the nature of inner speech. Luria (1975, 1981) and his student Akhutina (1975, 1978) incorporated several of Vygotsky's ideas about the syntactic and semantic structure of inner speech into their neuro-linguistic research, and authors such as Sokolov (1968, 1969) have conducted studies on the use of inner speech in various task settings. But neither Soviet nor Western research (for a sampling of the latter, see Zivin, 1979) has extended Vygotsky's ideas on the properties of inner speech in any important way. In order to do this, additional research on the philosophical foundations of the problem was required.