Daniel Stern’s The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985) revolutionized psychoanalytic thinking about both infant development and therapeutic work with adults. An enduring legacy of Stern’s opus is the belief that language plays a minor role in infant development. By contrast, recent research demonstrates that infants use others’ spoken words to understand their interpersonal experiences beginning in the first year of life. Indeed, word meanings emerge from lived experiences. The research compels us to think anew about the connectedness of lived experiences and the words of language, and has implications for understanding both infant development and therapeutic action.