A confusion between understanding and understanding symbols.
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Child Development↗
Biomedical subjects
Jean M Mandler
Publications and source records attributed to Jean M Mandler.
Thought before language.
To learn language infants must develop a conceptual base onto which language can be mapped. Recent research in infant cognitive development shows that at least by 9 months of age infants have developed a conceptual system sufficiently rich to allow language to begin. Evidence for this system is shown by categorization of objects above and beyond their perceptual appearance, problem-solving, long-term recall of events, and inductive inferences. During the next year, early concepts gradually become refined. However, at the time when language takes off they are often still less specific than many words in daily use, accounting for the phenomenon of overextension of word meaning.
Brain↗
Understanding spatial relations: flexible infants, lexical adults.
Concepts of containment, support, and degree of fit were investigated using nonverbal, preferential-looking tasks with 9- to 14-month-old infants and adults who were fluent in either English or Korean. Two contrasts were tested: tight containment vs. loose support (grammaticized as 'in' and 'on' in English by spatial prepositions and 'kkita' and 'nohta' in Korean by spatial verbs) and tight containment vs. loose containment (both grammaticized as 'in' in English but separately as 'kkita' and 'nehta' in Korean). Infants categorized both contrasts, suggesting conceptual readiness for learning such spatial semantics in either language. English-speaking adults categorized tight containment vs. loose support, but not tight vs. loose containment. However, Korean-speaking adults were successful at this latter contrast, which is lexicalized in their language. The adult data suggest that some spatial relations that are salient during the preverbal stage become less salient if language does not systematically encode them.
Adult↗