Lev Vygotsky believed that communication skills and interaction as a child helped develop cognitive thought and verbal skills. He believed that the mind could develop higher leaning skills through social interaction such as talking or writing Messages helped form concepts and cognitive understandings of words and objects. One thing that I can think of is when a kid sees a knife, someone usually stresses that it is bad, and can hurt us. The child then develops a cognitive response that the knife is bad. They child is also able to express that idea to others. This happens constantly, and as interaction increases, similar thinking can happen between interacting groups.
The article, "Shared Meaning" touches upon communication and how words can trigger different cognitive responses to some people. This makes me wonder when people tend to fork off and have different reactions As children, we were learning through play and communication. By high school, I personally felt that everyone in my school generally had a lot of similar cognitive responses. I remember having conversations with people I knew, and when you said a statement, people would generally react in a way similar to you. Of course it didn't happen all the time, we were still learning as our social world expanded. Today however, I begin to wonder why there are so many different reactions to statements. The couple in the article had an argument when the wife said he wasn't intimate. The man immediately went off without asking what she meant. I find that a lot of adults tend to have this problem. I constantly see people arguing because they don't think about what one person might be thinking a word or statement means. The article argues that people not taking the time to understand each other is taking away genuine dialogue. The lack of simlar language also causes confusion.
Vygotsky's beliefs do have a point. Development comes through communication. Do adults have the ability to develop further, or are they already too affected through past experience. By the age of adulthood, people who meet randomly from other parts of the world have already developed different cognitive thought through experience. We are no longer a group of kids who developed in the same context. Everything means something different to everyone else. The other problem with adulthood is that people don't want to admit they are wrong, because it affects their pride. People don't want to look stupid so they never inquire about words. The man probably didn't want to discuss the word intimacy because he may have been embarrassed. So the question is: Can adults ever have a shared meaning of subjects when they all live separate live and don't interact as much as children? Can being an established adult be harmful to opening up person to the intimacy of a genuine dialogue?
http://www.psychology.com/articles/?p=275
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