LANGUAGE FROM A SPECIAL PART OF THE UNIVERSE

If nothing else, language acquisition studies show that language does not develop through an individual's interaction with the natural environment. It emerges only out of social interaction, but social interaction within constrained limits. We would not know what a word means if we had not heard or seen it used by someone else in a context that made the relation between word and meaning reasonably unambiguous. Once language is acquired at a sufficient level, of course, its possessor is able to use language and the aids to thought that language provides to determine the meaning of an unfamiliar word by inference from its context. But the statement still holds. Without the introduction to words and the seminal idea that words symbolize – without the initial acquisition process, which is social – we would have no equipment with which to make linguistic inferences.

It may seem that the condition emphasized above is crucial; the association of a word with meaning makes both conversing and verbal thinking possible; but verbal thinking needs language, and language needs the interaction of at least two human beings.