Language and Thought: What comes first?

Language and thoughts have a strong relationship. It seems that one wouldn't exist without the other, but one must have come first. Different scientists and investigators have tried to answer this query, and I will present some of them in this entry.

Ferdinand de Saussure stated that language and thought cannot be easily separated and that they were like the two faces of a sheet of paper: you can't cut one face without cutting the other. He described language as Langue (abstract system of sings and rules that make up language structure) and Parole (Langue being used). He also said that there can't be a detailed thought without speech, nor meaningful words without thought, so both need of the other to exist.

Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard, said that "Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about objects. These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later." This means she believes that thought came first, because young children can think in objects without language.

Steven Pinker also has an opinion in this topic, which is showed in the following video.

Pinker thinks that we think in images, and that language is the just the way we communicate our thoughts to others. This means that he clearly separates thought and language, and that he is sure that thought comes before language.

Sources:
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/07.22/21-think.html
http://www.williamjames.com/transcripts/pinker1.htm