Extension Of Lurias Psycholinguistic Studies In Poland

Neuropsychology Review. Vol. 9. No. 2, 1999 Extension of Luria's Psycholinguistic Studies in Poland Botydsir L. J. Kaczmarek2'3 One of Luria's basic interests was the organization of human cognitive processes, and thinking in particular. He believed that language and thought are closely related, and hence the manner in which we speak reflects the way we think. To verify this assumption, he and his collaborators performed a number of interesting psycholinguistic experiments with subjects of various ages and cultural backgrounds. The tasks used made the evaluation of both receptive and expressive language possible. The Narrative Ability Test described here stems from Luna's observations to a considerable degree. The test was administered to preschool children (N = 106). schoolchildren (N =143). adolescents (N = 89), adults (n=126), and older persons (N = 175). Findings of the 20-ycar studies with normal and deviant populations indicate close relationships among thought, language, and self-control. It was found that difficulty in developing narratives corresponds with a disability to process complex information. Correlations between narrative skills and age, sex. and social background were also noted. INTRODUCTION During my 1974 visit to Professor Luria's laboratory, some of us were asked by our host to read manuscripts of his two latest books (Luria, 1975, 1979) and to give our comments. Unfortunately, I was too young and too shy at that time to express any criticism, even though I did not share the professor's fascination with Chomsky's (1965) model of transformational generative grammar. Besides, I ascertained that this fascination was not deeply rooted and sometimes meant simply the replacement of the old terms. For example, the term deep structure was used in place of inner speech, yet its sense remained the same as in older books by Luria (1966,1970). At the same time, I found Luria's considerations on relationships among language, thought, and behavior discussed in the text Language and Cognition (1979) extremely interesting. The book revealed to me other facets of Aleksandr Romanovitch's broad research, namely, his interest in developmental as well as cultural psychology. The studies, performed in Central Asia with another prominent Soviet psychologist, L. S. Vygotsky, showed that a number of logical problems, with which most of us struggled at school, had little to do with the way people process information in natural circumstances (Luria, 1976, 1979). Accordingly, peasants who were not taught to accomplish such tasks simply refuse to solve them. This finding was further confirmed in the experiments carried out in Poland by Tlokinski (1995), who used techniques elaborated by Zeigarnik (1962), a close collaborator of Luria's and Vygotsky "s. Tlokiriski examined schoolchildren, manual workers, and college students, giving them varied linguistic tasks that included statements expressing spatial and time relations, double negation, conversion of time, formal similarity of subject and object, comparison, and possession. Other tasks required evaluation of figurative phrases as well as assessent of relations occurring among words presented to the subjects. It was found that all the preceding tasks were difficult for the uneducated persons. These findings are of great importance in connection with another significant aspect of Luria's studies: his investigation of the role of language in the regulation of human behavior (Luria, 1961,1979). He performed a number of experiments with both normal