ABSTRACT

When looking at 2–4-year-old children playing with different objects, one may notice that they are able to use the same object for different purposes. They can, for instance, use a plastic plate while simulating a children’s party, or as a frisbee or even as a hat that they put on their head. Such pretend play is viewed as expressing the emergence of symbolic thought, which develops progressively from this age (Piaget and Inhelder, 1966/1969; Santrock, 2006). What is interesting in that situation is that it strongly suggests that the concept hat does not merely emerge from the shape or colour of the manipulated object, but also from how the object is manipulated and positioned with respect to the body. The crucial role of how the object is manipulated in pretend play indicates then that concepts, such as the concept hat, not only refer to certain classes of objects with specific physical attributes, but also to the actions that are generally associated with their use. Consequently, when evoked in a non-usual context the functional aspect of object knowledge enables us to understand that the observed manipulated object refers in fact to a different object characterised by specific dynamical properties. By association, one may hypothesise that the verbal concept used to refer to a particular object, like the word hat, contains not only information concerning the physical attributes of the object, but also information about the context in which it is usually used (sunny afternoon, rainy evening …) and about how it is generally manipulated (see also Borghi, this volume; Rueschemeyer and Bekkering, this volume; Taylor and Zwaan, this volume). The meaning of words is then thought to result from the association of word forms with the concepts they represent, not with the things themselves, and with the phenomenal experience associated with the content the words refer to in terms of sensorimotor experience. In agreement with this, neuropsychological studies of brain-lesioned patients have provided evidence for specific capacities of recognising objects by their function. Patients with posterior right brain lesion often show signs of spatial neglect, a syndrome characterised by patients failing to respond to stimuli presented on the side of space contralateral to their lesion. In one interesting case, it was shown that neglect patients can detect objects in multi-object displays when cued with an action (‘find the object to drink from’), but not when cued with the object’s name (‘find the cup’; Humphreys and Riddoch, 2001), suggesting that linguistic knowledge about objects refers to dynamical properties in some respects.