As newborn babies do not yet know how to speak a language, what is their internal dialogue when they think to themselves?
In: Biology
Newborns can barely see a foot from their face. They don’t need to have thoughts. They just react to the stimulate around them. They quickly start to make sense of their environment but they don’t need an inner voice to do that.
That being said inner voices and language are important for children and adults. We can infer how important language and the inner voice is because deaf people who do not learn language will be significantly handicapped even though the brain of a deaf person is not different than that of a hearing person. Even if they only learn a spoke language they will fail to develop an inner voice and will still have some mental handicaps. Unfortunately we have a lot of information about this because for a long time people thought that it was better to only teach deaf people spoken language.
I like this quote from Helen Keller said “Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. (…) Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another.”
https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/07/how-deaf-people-think/
I think there were a couple documentaries on this. Look Whose Talking and Look Whose Talking Now.
Internal dialogue develops around the 7-8 years of age. [Source](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_monologue)
Any newborns you can survey on that subject?
There are actually some adults who don’t have an internatal dialogue. And some who do have it all the time; while others can turn it on or off. It’s not as big a deal as you think it is and is not at all necessary for thinking. Babies simply don’t have one.
Language format of thinking is acquired skill, humans naturally think in pictures, not in words. Earliest forms of writing were based on visual symbols (pictographs, hieroglyphs, etc). Internal dialogue of small children probably resembles a flow of pictures and emotionally charged associations. They “think” visually.
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