Problems of speech development and of teaching language in the works of L.I. Bozhovich

This paper analyses the manuscript by L.I. Bozhovich "Speech and Practical Intellectual Activity of a Child" in the context of its author's whole scientific work. In one of her first studies, L.I. Bozhovich had focused on the process of overcoming impulsiveness and achieving self-regulated behaviour in children. This manuscript describes her experimental work on revealing the complex relations between practical action, thinking, and speech. Later she studied the relations between feelings and reasoning that require highly developed verbal-logical thinking. In 1937—1946 L.I. Bozhovich investigated the problems of teaching mother tongue, of language competence and so-called "sense of language" development. As the article states, the early period of L.I. Bozhovich's work was not an episode, but a whole "epoch" in her scientific biography.