Birth to a New Thought: Links between Early Word Learning and Conceptual Organization

That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, and set it free!. .. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. —Keller 1904, 22 Word learning, more than any other development achievement, stands at the very center of the crossroad of human cognition and language. Even before they can tie their own shoes, human infants spontaneously form concepts 1 to capture various relations among the objects and events they encounter, and they learn words to express them. I have argued that these two advances do not proceed independently. Rather, from the onset of word learning, human infants' conceptual and linguistic advances are powerfully linked. This chapter is devoted to examining the origin and unfolding of these links. In recent work, I have proposed that infants approach the task of word learning equipped with a broad, universally shared expectation. This initially broad expectation permits infants to link novel words (that are applied to objects) to commonalities among those named objects. This broad initial link, which is available to infants at the very onset of word learning, serves at least three essential functions. First, it supports the formation of a stable repertoire of concepts. Second, it supports infants' first efforts to establish reference , and in this way promotes infants' earliest lexicons. Third, and perhaps most radically, this initially broad, universal link sets the stage for the discovery of the more specific links between particular types of words (e.g., nouns, adjectives, verbs) and particular types