The person, being, certainly, to eat the being conceiving. Existence of abstract thinking and the developed speech – the main sign distinguishing it from animals. As the human speech and thinking are connected among themselves?
Thinking is the highest mental function of human consciousness. Judgment of surrounding reality begins with perception of the accidental feelings and their various combinations capturing the essence of things and their interrelation. The problem of thinking consists in knowledge of reality by comparison and disclosure of necessary communications in a real specific situation and their separation from accidentally arising in any special case.
Human thinking is capable to form a thought both in speech, and in an evident and effective and evident and figurative form and includes both sensual images, and abstract, theoretical concepts.
The speech and thinking cannot exist together and separately from each other, but concepts identical are not. So, different people can put the same thought different into words. There are also some simplest types of the speech having purely communicative functions, i.e. which are not connected with thinking directly. Such versions are the mimicry, gestures, language of gestures, the speech of children of early age. In general the speech is not just the tool allowing to take out in out of the idea already ready shaped. Sometimes the verbal form allows not just to formulate, but also to create a thought.
Thinking – a concept difficult and many-sided therefore it is treated and classified from different sides. For example, the Soviet scientist S.L. Rubenstein including that thinking is a concept indivisible, nevertheless divided it - though is conditional - on evident and theoretical. Noting that the second type corresponds to higher level of thinking, he emphasized that both views exist in unity and constantly one into another is passed. Rubenstein considered wrong Hegel's thought that figurative thinking corresponds to the lowest level as "the image enriches a thought" and allows to transfer not only the fact of the phenomenon, but also the attitude towards him.
Psychologists consider that at the highest, verbal level of thinking, the thought and a word are connected almost inseparably. In the works famous Soviet psychologist L.S. Vygotsky entered unit of verbal thinking – a word meaning. He wrote that the word meaning can be equally referred both to thinking, and to the speech. On the one hand it reflects that contents which is put in it by native speakers at communication to be witnesses with each other. In other words, understanding is reached due to mutual exchange of word meanings, i.e. the speech.
On the other hand, the word meaning is a concept. The term "concept" reflects feature of human thinking to generalize and mark out essential properties, features and the relations of objects or phenomena of purely specific signs. From this it follows that the word meaning is also thinking unit at its highest verbal level.