Имя как врожденное языковое свойство

Abstract

The article shows that the child learns the names of objects from the input only because the property of an object to have a name is innate for the child. According to recent experiments by S. Waxman et al., 6-month-old infants, hearing adults consistently call different objects with one word, spontaneously form a subject category from them. This result indicates a very early influence of speech on the cognition of infants, which clearly contradicts the classical position (V. Stern, L.S. Vygotsky) that speech and thinking have different genetic roots. Therefore, they initially develop separately in a child and only after a year and a half they connect. To explain the new results, an alternative hypothesis is proposed in the article: speech and thinking have a single genetic root, since the name of an object is initially included as a special sensory (acoustic) characteristic among its sensory characteristics (visual, acoustic, tactile, etc.). In view of this, the mental representation of the object has the form: “perceptual Image of the object + its Name”. It is assumed that when infants perceive similar objects and hear that they are called the same word, for example, they see different dogs and hear the phrase This is a dog every time, instances of this structure are concretized in their minds: “Dog image 1 + dog”, “Dog image 2 + dog” etc. As a result, a set of different images of dogs with the same name dog is collected in their memory. Following the property of an innate name – to name identical objects, – infants combine these instances into one category – Dogs and build a typical image – the Form from specific Images. As a result, the concept “DOG = Form of dog + dog” appears in the memory of infants. Thus, it explains how early infant categories and concepts are formed with the help of names. Next, experimental data supporting this hypothesis are considered.