MASTERING THE INTANGIBLE THROUGH LANGUAGE *

For many years, psychological research in the area of language and cognition was guided by the idea that language, in particular the language of labeling, was a key tool in the child’s acquisition of c ~ n c e p t s j ~ Recently, there has been a dramatic reversal of this view. Influenced strongly by the Piagetian model, researchers have increasingly adopted the idea that language does not determine the formation of concepts. Instead, language is seen to reflect the concepts that the child has acquired prior to, and hence independent of, the acquisition of language?-1° The current view is captured in the statement by Nelson11 that “a new approach. . . is necessary because current and traditional models of concept formation are not designed to solve the problem at issue: How does the child match words to his concepts? They are, rather, designed to answer a different question: How does the child form a concept to fit the word?” The latter conceptualization of the problem has been deemed inadequate because it supposes that “the child learns meaning from his encounters with the language rather than from encounters with the physical and social world” (p. 268). This new formulation has been of value in redressing a long imbalance in the language-thought controversy. In its turn, however, it stands in danger of recreating the imbalance, albeit in the opposite direction. Specifically, many current statements are worded so as to suggest that this view is applicable to almost all of language functioning. In this form, it represents a major overextension of an idea that evolved in the context of studying the young child’s earliest linguistic performance. During this initial period of language mastery, the child does seem to direct his efforts toward finding the semantic equivalents of relationships he has long since mastered on the preverbal, sensorimotor level. As Brown12 has pointed out, these include relations such as “the nominative (e.g., “That ball”), expressions of recurrence (e.g., “More ball”). . . expressions of disappearance or nonexistence (e.g., “All gone ball”). . . the possessive (e.g., “Daddy chair”), two sorts of locative (e.g., “Book table” and “Go store”), and the attributive (e.g., “Big house”) (p. 101). A significant feature of analyses such as these is that they are confined largely to words that denote clear perceptual referents-i.e., to terms that McNeill’) has described as representing “portrayable correlates.” Essential to the notion of a portrayable correlate is the idea that the referent in question can be perceived through the sense of vision, touch, and hearing, with vision playing an almost overwhelmingly dominant role. Given the known proficiency of even the very young child in the visual sphere,I4 it seems reasonable to accept the idea that the child’s mastery of the protrayable can proceed well, without language, and accord-