Vocate: Luria on speech v language

Spoken Language
The speech system that reorganizes mental activity to permit the conscious voluntary functioning of higher mental processes is very complex and includes both speech and language. These components are often studied in isolation from each other; yet, as Luria indicates, the origins of speech and language are intertwined:
Under the conditions of primitive society language began to develop as a means of communication; there, in accordance with laws not yet known to us, verbal speech appeared. In the development of verbal speech words gradually became separated from work activities and from signalling gestures; words began to abstract and at the same time to generalize various characteristics of objects. They thus achieved designating and at the same time generalizing-systematizing functions.
In later social history language attained its complex, phonetic, lexical, and grammatical structure and gradually became the objective system of codes which is well known to contemporary linguistics. ( Luria, 1970b, pp. 20-21)
This complexity, which developed gradually, necessitates the separation of "verbal speech" into its speech and language components before one can hope for a clear understanding of the phenomenon:
It was de Saussure who was responsible for the clear differentiation between the concept of language (langue), as an objective system of sounds formed in the course of history, and the concept of speech (parole), by which he understood the process of transmission of information with the aid of the language system . . . . ( Luria, 1976a, p. 10)
The term language is used throughout the book to refer to an "objective system of codes" as Luria defined it; or more precisely to "The culturally determined syntactic systematization of signs and/or symbols" ( Dance, 1979, p. 2). This conceptual definition will assist in understanding the theoretical unit of spoken language although it is not sufficient to delineate the same.