One of the most useful examples in our reading of Wittgenstein was Judy's story of her baby learning one of her first words.

The story is that the grandmother was teaching the child to say the word "bear" by pointing to a decal of a bear on the baby's milk cup.  The grandmother pointed and said "bear" enthusiastically.  And when the baby said something that sounded like "bear" she made encouraging gestures and sounds.

It's a familiar story.  And it sounds a lot like the way Augustine said that he learned language in beginning of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.  Augustine said that he learned language by people pointing to objects while naming them as they did.  In response to their naming he said:
 

The story of Judy's baby helps to clarify Wittgenstein's questioning of Augustine's account.    It is one thing to imagine that the baby knows what you're pointing to when you point to the live puppy is and says "puppy!"  But it is just inconceiveable, is it not, that the baby knows that the grandmother is pointing to the bear on the cup and not the cup, or the milk, or the color of the cup, or some other property.  And if she had been pointing to the cup itself, how would the baby have known that?   Or distinguished it from the case of her pointing to some other property?

So, Judy's story of her baby has provided us with an ongoing useful illustration of this important Wittgensteinian point, a point that lays the foundation, really, for Wittgenstein's later work.  In the case of Judy's baby, and all of us as babies, it appears from this example that our first words are less rich with linguistic grasping than we might first imagine.

Reflecting on this, it seems that as kids we must learn to say the words when people point to things without quite knowing what we are saying or what people are pointing to, or even what it means to point and name things.  Like Judy's baby, we just knew that saying "cup" when grandma pointed to it really brought an amusing charade of gestures and sounds, and perhaps this was enough to get us started on the long road of learning language.

I thught of all this this morning as I was thinking about preparing for my New York trip to visit Lois Holzman and Fred Newman.   Before I got started, I decided to peruse the net looking for more things on Vygotsky -- because Newman and Holzman are inspired by Vygotsky and I want to familiarize myself with him a little more more before my trip.

In doing that I ran across an interesting website review and analysis of Vygotsky's book, Thought and Language.  I bring this to your attention now because Vygotsky has a word for this period of learning language that the story of Judy's baby illustrates for us so well.  I have just learned Vygotsky's word for this period:  It is called the "chimpanzoid age."

I have put that term in the PMTH dictionary, now.  It is the learning of language before thought and speech are brought together.  This is a term that Vygotsky took, by the way,  from Koehler and Buehler (see the article above for references).

Isn't it nice when things come together like this?  From what I have learned of Vygotsky, much of it is contained in or complemented by Wittgenstein's later work, the Philosophical Investigations.