Esperienza, linguaggio e memoria nello sviluppo infantile

The aim of this essay is to analyse the close relationship that exists between experience, language and memory, considering in particular the ontogeny of language in human beings. Right from early childhood, the child begins to build up an initial “storehouse” of sounds, sensations, sensory impressions, etc., accumulating, in short, what it will need when it later learns to associate words and meanings. The child proceeds by establishing links, creating spatial and temporal correlations and, in doing so, it is not an isolated and passive individual but is part of a social network, ready to benefit from interaction with others. In this way, patterns, formats or scripts are created, repeated events in a shared situation that constitute, so to speak, the conditions of possibility for children to acquire the first linguistic signs and become fully part of the linguistic community to which they belong. In this cognitive and experiential process, memory plays a central role, both in defining the structure of the schemes or scripts that underlie the categorical organization of our semantic memory, and in the constitution of our mental lexicon, in which no word lives in isolation, but is connected to other words either by similarity of form, affinity of meaning or proximity in habitual use, or in relation to the experiences its use has had to do with.