ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the separation of the senses created the problem of intersensory meaning. The doctrine of association has been applied in many areas of psychology, in particular to the acquisition of word meaning. The meaning of a word is supposedly acquired by association with the sensory qualities that that word represents. Associationist accounts of word meaning have been severely criticized by philosophers and linguists. The core of the theory of meaning was a theory of representation. A differentiation theory contends that the perceptual world of the young infant is less differentiated than that of the adult. The chapter shows that perceptual development is a process of differentiation and specification has its counterpart in theories of the growth of word meaning. The perceptual system has reached a state in which representations are specific, then the word use will begin as specific.
