Many human concepts don’t exist without words like the idea of gravity, a corporation, or a legal case. For most of us, it’s hard to imagine life without language, as our minds are filled with these abstract ideas that feel as real as physical objects.
Almost all people learn their first language as children and don’t remember life before then; memories before around age 4 are hazy, and by that age, children are already speaking quite well. Rare accounts of those who learned their first language as adults show a clear divide between two very different phases of life.
Still, it’s clear that thought exists before language. Just ask any parent about their baby, and they’ll likely describe how insightful they seem.
What exactly babies can understand before they start talking remains an area of debate. How much can human thought do without language?
This question matters not just because we want to understand children better, but because the link between language and thought is one of the most critical questions of our time. It sits at the center of discussions about artificial intelligence and whether it could ever be truly aware or even have its own intentions.
Of course, there are plenty of things that babies can’t do before they start speaking. For example, most don’t recognize themselves in a mirror until they’re about 18 months old. Another classic example is the “A not B task.” In this task, an experimenter repeatedly hides a toy in one location, “A,” where the baby can reach it, and the baby successfully retrieves it. Then, the experimenter hides the toy in a new location, “B,” while the baby watches. However, most babies under a year old still look for the toy in location “A,” struggling to understand that it’s now somewhere else.
But sometimes, babies surprise us. For example, many languages have a curious link between round shapes and soft sounds. Words describing smooth, round objects often sound round themselves: ball, round, or blob. Meanwhile, words for sharp objects tend to sound sharp and edgy, like spike or knife.
You might think this is a cultural thing: as we learn language, we connect sounds with meanings, so words about sharp objects end up sounding sharp. But babies show the same connection before they know what a knife or a spike is. They naturally connect jagged shapes with the sound “kiki” and round shapes with the sound “bouba.” This might be due to a connection between the sound and the shape the mouth makes when creating it, which could be an innate association or one formed soon after birth.
This example shows how studies on babies can help us understand what parts of our thinking are shaped by culture and what parts are hardwired into us.
New research from Jean-Rémy Hochmann’s lab in Lyon suggests that babies’ understanding is more advanced than we often assume. Evidence shows there’s a basic understanding of structure before there are even words – a kind of early mental framework. The study, led by Liuba Papeo, found that babies can assign roles like “doer” and “receiver” when looking at images of people interacting (such as hugging or kicking) and are surprised if these roles are unexpectedly switched. This mirrors the process of assigning roles like subject and object in sentences.
This suggests that “subject” and “object” may be fundamental concepts in our brains, existing at a level deeper than language itself. It’s likely that other core ideas are also present at this foundational level.
This research would likely resonate with Noam Chomsky, who has long argued that what we call “language” is an outward form of our natural thought process. According to this idea, words – which we learn from culture – fill in a pre-existing framework of thought that’s rooted not in culture, but in biology and evolution.
Chomsky has often argued that language isn’t primarily for communication; it’s for thinking. I sometimes struggle to explain this idea to my students. They often point out that animals and babies seem to think, too.
This new study offers a good way to address that question. We might say there’s “communication language” grammar plus words, which we use to share thoughts with others and “Chomskyan language,” a broader, abstract framework that we use internally. Babies don’t yet have communication language, but as this study shows, they do have an internal, abstract language.
Understanding the boundaries between these two forms of language is a significant challenge for neuroscience. A large part of our internal world may stem not from culture, as we might assume, but from physical, biological factors (such as the shape of the mouth when making certain sounds like “kiki” or “bouba”).
If this proves true, then artificial intelligence which lacks a grounding in physical reality might fundamentally lack the rich understanding that humans and other creatures possess, as some neuroscientists argue.
On the other hand, if we form most of our understanding of the world through language as linguistic relativists and some science fiction authors suggest then it’s possible that AI could eventually match, or even surpass, our grasp of reality.