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2025 Vol. 16 №4

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Alexey D. Koshelev

How can the ability of six-month-old infants to learn words, meanings, and referential categories be explained?

DOI
10.5922/2225-5346-2025-4-12
Pages
211—233
innate knowledge word structure 6-month-old infant referential words referential relation

Abstract

According to the generally accepted Stern-Vygotsky paradigm, preverbal infants, while learning words, first learn concepts and names (phonetic complexes) separately. And then, in the second year of life, they associate the learned names with concepts, forming words “name + meaning (concept)”. However, recent studies show that 6-month-old infants already know some common words, such as banana, mouth, and hand, indicating that they understand their referential uses. These and other results indicate that infants develop the associated pairs of “name + concept” from a very early age. This clearly contradicts the generally accepted para­digm. To explain how early words appear in infants, this article introduces a hypothesis, which states the innateness of the dual structure of the referential word in infants: “the sound template of the name + the conceptual template of the meaning”, in which the name and the meaning are initially connected. As infants accrue speech experience, this structure is trans­formed into a referential word in two stages. First, by using the name template, infants isolate a specific name in an adult's phrase and form a specific word with an unknown meaning: “the specific name + the meaning template”, and then, based on the referents of this word suggest­ed by adults, infants form its meaning, thereby obtaining a referential word, that is, “the spe­cific name + the specific meaning”.

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