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In our terminology, inner speech is representation, and external speech is communication. Communication is not a straightforward replication of representation, as if we could simply say what we thought. Nor is thinking simply a product of what is sayable, as if the development of our meanings were singularly speech-centered. There is always a grammatical transposition, whether one chooses to use the word “grammar” in its narrower sense, as the syntax of speech, or in the broader sense of patterns in meaning that we use in this book.

Vygotsky’s starting point is an argument he has with the work of child psychologist Jean Piaget, his contemporary. Piaget documents the “egocentric speech” of the young child, a stage of development where the child speaks to themself, oblivious of communication. As the child gets older, egocentric speech disappears. Egocentric speech is a moment in the transition from the asocial baby to the social child. It appears as a stage in the assimilation of speech, until a point where it is internalized as self-speaking thought. Then, speaking to oneself becomes like speaking to others. Speech has come to mind.⁸⁹

At every point, Vygotsky, and in later reiterations, Luria, turn this narrative of life history and meaning formation around the other way. The child starts social, connected to the breast of its mother, acquiescing to the orders of its elders. Egocentric speech is social too. Vygotsky’s empirical research shows that children mostly speak to themselves when there are others around. He calls this “collective monologue,” requiring that the child is “with comprehending others to maintain the illusion of being understood.”

In a final stage, the vocalization stops, and becomes what Vygotsky terms “inner speech” – social meaning again, but in a different way. The social has become individual, and so the individual is socialized. Where Piaget’s primal individual becomes social by assimilation and speech becomes a conduit for thought, Vygotsky’s primal social being becomes individual by transposing social meanings into their representations.

And here is another fundamental difference between Piaget and Vygotsky – the grammar of representations in inner speech does not during the course of development converge with speech; rather it diverges from the grammar of vocalized speech. The divergence can be traced in the processes of development of egocentric speech in the small child, which with time becomes less scrutable compared to vocalized speech. Inner speech becomes less and less intelligible to an accidental listener; it becomes less and less like speech in its form and less communicative in its function.

If speech requires action structures of predication,^§MS2.1.1 where there is a subject, late egocentric speech is a precursor to inner speech, where there are only predicates. As it moves toward inner speech, egocentric speech becomes more abbreviated and less coherent to people who may happen to be overhearing.⁹⁰ In the terms of our grammar, inner speech (representation) is maximally context-dependent. We don’t need an explicitly referenced subject because we are the subject or the subject is just obvious. Overt speech (communication) needs a subject if the predicate is to have meaning intelligible to another person. These are fundamental differences – differences we must navigate in the transposition of meanings-in-representation to meanings-in-communication.

Sometimes representation may come closer to communication, when for instance we rehearse something that we plan to say, or when we envisage a photograph in our mind’s eye before we take it, or where we foreshadow a gesture – pointing in each case to the imminent movability of meanings in transposition. These are the kinds of meaning-work we do in order to move between representation and communication. In any case, anticipatory representation is by no means straightforward prefiguring of the communication that may follow.

We also suggest that these representations are intrinsically synesthetic, more so than communication which is always constrained by the practicalities of its materiality. A word in inner speech is overlaid in simultaneous multimodal hieroglyph of image, embodied feeling, senses of space, sound, and more. The further inner speech is from vocalized speech in its grammatical structures, the more tightly bound it will be with other forms of meaning.

Representation, then, is a primary site of synesthesia. The practicalities of communication, and the materiality of its media – the affordances of communication – tend to separate the forms of meaning to a greater degree than happens in the mind. Representation is more fluidly synesthetic because its media are virtual, immaterial envisionings of practices of meaning that were in the first instance social and material, but which in the moment of representation are no longer that.

In thought, we can exceed the material and plan to transform the social. This is why the mind becomes a fertile site for the hopes and dreams of what Jean-Paul Sartre calls “the Imaginary.”^§MS3.1.2b

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⁸⁸ Lev Semyonovich Vygostky, 1934 [1986], Thought and Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 225.

⁸⁹ Ibid., pp. 226, 231; Jean Piaget, 1923 [2002], Language and Thought of the Child, London: Routledge.

⁹⁰ Lev Semyonovich Vygostky, 1934 [1986], Thought and Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 226–38; Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, 1981, Language and Cognition, New York: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 104–07; James V. Wertsch, 1991, Voices of the Mind, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 40–43.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 50–52. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Lev Vygotsky’s “Inner Speech” §AS1.2.1a