Why This Question? Commentary on Vivona

Jeanine Vivona has presented us a well-documented selection of the copious research findings from academic studies on early language development over the past fifty years. Aware that results are constrained by both the question asked and the research method used in answer, she is more careful than many writers in presenting these findings, not extrapolating generalities about global capacities beyond what a specific study actually demonstrates. Nevertheless, the findings can be summarized as soundly establishing the human infant's aural-processing proclivity for human voices in its environment, a proclivity which, present even before birth, must be built upon an innate endowment, the parameters of which linguists and neuroscientists seek to discover. From that established platform, she then asks if parental speech impacts the infant's emerging linguistic competence, and if emerging linguistic competence permeates the infant's inner world of concepts and feelings. She concludes from the research that, indeed, the answer to both questions is yes. The implications for psychoanalysis are not trivial: our intrapsychic world is jointly constituted from the start.

If the infant is from the beginning parsing out distinctive patterns that are meaningful in the ambient language environment, then those distinctions must be implicated in all other categories of learning taking place during the first two years of life, a span often cited in the psychoanalytic literature as the “preverbal period.” To propose otherwise is to claim that the child masters its language apart from all other experiences, as a separate line of development or perhaps as genetically preprogrammed, such that competency emerges independently during the child's third year—in other words, that cognitive or social learning proceeds during the first years of life independent of language. It is precisely this thesis that Vivona calls into