the development of language allows humans not only to discuss, but also to conceptualise abstract ideas.... in the past deaf people used to have mental disabilities .. but now things are improved by sign language...
so my question, is how come babies , or deaf people who are not exposed to any language able to think???
i don't have an answer for that.. but i will let this question open for discussion.???

Very interesting Q, and I will try and search for the answer, since it is somehow related to my major.

To start with, there is what's called 'Critical period' within the ages 2-7 years old, where the input of language is vital, if for reasons the input was not sufficient, a lack of laguage will be noticed later on in the child's life.

One interesting example of this lack of language during this age is "Wild children". Wild children are ones who were distracted from learning basic things including the very beginning foundations of language, they were basically not exposed to people thus not exposed to communication.

A well known case is the little child who lived in the forest with foxes and wild animals.
There are alot of cases, some of them are not discovered until they have passed their childhood age.

I hope I am not drifting off topic, nevertheless, i can elaborate on this if I am going on the same track.

Can I just bring to your attention that we have 5 sences: smell, sight, hearing, touch, taste ( I won't consider the 6th sence here!) Anyway, what I meant is all these contribute to our understanding of "Language and Thinking". So if you are deaf you still have 4 other sensories which can help you think and learn a language. A very popular example is the impressive "Helen Keller" I don't know how many of you know her but she was "blind and deaf" at the age of 18 months!! She managed to become a writter of very famous novels!!!

As for the example that Silent Tune brought "wild child" in the forest .... I think the child has found communication according to the environment the child was let in! So definetly his "thinking" would be of animal nature rather than human nature as the environments differ!

thanx silent tune and seham for ur ideas..
seham ur point is valuable that our brain is trained by the five senses..
but what if we only concentrate about language and thinking,,,.
don't we have the feeling that we hear voices while we are thinking, which i think it is the exprssion of the language words in ur brain...

but what came to my mind is the following, i know in the past where sign language is not well discovered or taught, children who are born deaf they developed some kind of mental disabilities ( even they have other senses are intact)... but later when sign language is started to be taught , it is found that deaf children are better in term of mentality...

yes, i agree with u silent tune about the wild children.. i believe there is a way which a wild child uses to communicate with animal and this communication develops as a language ( as we know animal do have lang.), and this will lead to thinking . right...

so is it a must that in oredr to be able to think u should have a language.. thus it mean that babies do have a language right...

that is my point of view...what do u think..

yes i forgot something,, silent tune since u r studying speech therapy, i know a hypothesis and actually i don't have a book to know about it , so if u have a book talking about languages could u please look for "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" .. cos i feel that it might help us in our discussion..

hello friends any comment...

I don't know much about languages, but there is the fact that human beings do not live alone in this world and each society is pretty much governed by it's language and I do agree with Fahad that the unconcious world is also determined by languages. We can't just assume that the use of language is to communicate and to solve basic problems. We can never conisder two languages to be similar because each would govern the activities and habits of it's society.
Freud talked about the id, ego and super ego, I'm not sure about this, but couldn't it be possible that languages are related to the formation of the super ego? I mean the super ego is developed through learning, so they must be related.
That's what I was able to conclude, so correct me if I'm wrong!:)