If language has little influence on thinking in adulthood, does it play a greater role during development ? Language could constitute a kind of temporary scaffolding, necessary only for the construction of thought. On the one hand, it could facilitate the acquisition of elementary concepts, by directly labeling the concepts to be learned (Lupyan's hypothesis) or by drawing attention to interesting properties of the external world (Sandy Waxman's work). On the other hand, it could act as aglue that enables us to assemble conceptual primitives from our innatecore knowledge to form composite concepts that we wouldn't otherwise be able to formulate (Elizabeth Spelke's hypothesis), or that we'd have a much harder time discovering, given the immense space of Combinatorics concepts that our brain is capable of representing, but doesn't have the time to explore all of them (my own hypothesis).
The lecture examined several empirical works that put these possibilities to the test. Firstly, experience shows that labeling objects with words does indeed facilitate their learning, in both children and adults. This effect is mainly attentional. When learning an object name, children restrict the space of hypotheses to the shape of objects, which speeds up their categorization. Verbal labels also help to individualize objects.
