From people, to plans, to objects: Changes in the meaning of early words and their relation to cognitive development

Abstract

Some accounts of early relational words, words such as ‘no’, ‘more’, and ‘there’, have stressed their social importance. Other accounts have emphasized their cognitive significance. We here report the results of a longitudinal study suggesting that there are several distinguishable uses of these words, and that these uses develop in a predictable three-step sequence. In the first phase, children use these words in social ways. Specifically, the word ‘there’ is used to draw the attention of another person to an object; the word ‘no’ is used to refuse suggestions, and the word ‘more’ is used to request assistance. In the second phase, children use these words to encode plans. Specifically, ‘there’ encodes the success of a plan; ‘no’ encodes the failure of a plan, and ‘more’ encodes the repetition of a plan. In the third phase, these words are used to encode relationships between objects. ‘There’ encodes the location of objects; ‘more’ encodes the similarity of objects, and ‘no’ is used to negate propositions. We also report two further studies that confirm these findings and show, too, that the shift from social uses to plan uses is related to the development of the ability to use insight to solve certain cognitive problems. The results show that children may use ‘no’ and ‘there’ in social ways before they develop insight, but that they begin to use these words to encode the success and failure of plans at about the same time that they first develop insight. Taken together, the studies discussed here show a predictable three-step developmental progression in children's uses of certain words and also suggest that at around 18 months children begin to apply these words to their concurrent cognitive concerns.