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First ours, to provide an account of ontogenesis. Young children start off learning to distinguish instances: the sights, objects, people, gestures, and spoken words that represent and communicate the specificities of their immediate, concrete experience. Later they learn to conceptualize, layering generalizations over the specifics of experience. These are fundamentally different modes of thinking and action.

Now (mostly) in Vygotsky and Luria’s words. After a “pre-intellectual phase”⁶⁸ where they learn to feel, see, and hear distinguishable things as would any other animal, children begin “symbolic activity,” using objects, images, and words to make meaning.⁶⁹ This is an essentially multimodal process of meaning-making, in which children move beyond mere stimulus and response that governs activity and learning for all animals, to the use of artifacts that mediate activity and meaning.⁷⁰

Take toys: “A pile of clothes or a piece of wood becomes a baby in a game because the same gestures that depict holding a baby in one’s hands or feeding a baby can apply to them. The child’s self-motion, his own gestures, are what assign the function of a sign to an object and give it meaning.”⁷¹ Or take images: “Often children’s drawings not only disregard but also directly contradict the actual perception of the object … For instance, a child will draw legs that grow straight out of a head, omitting the neck and torso … Children do not strive for representation; they are very much more symbolists than naturalists.”⁷² Spoken words similarly symbolize.

Despite the differences in their forms of meaning, these tools for meaning, these mediators of meaningful activity are equally “mnemono-technic symbols.”⁷³ Objects, speech, and gestures are meaning-making tools of the same cognitive order. And all are the products of socio-cultural context, presenting opportunities for meaning based on their available designs (to return for a moment to our terminology). We learn to become through the designs that are available in these historically evolved forms of meaning – the objects, gestures, and words we have at hand.

In the development of the child, the journey towards conceptualization occurs through a number of phases. From a world of circumstantially co-located instances, the child moves step by step into the world of concepts. First, the instances go into “unorganised congeries” or “heaps … consisting of disparate objects, grouped together …, inherently unrelated objects linked by chance in the child’s perception … Many words,” Vygotsky says, “have in part the same meaning to the child and the adult, especially words referring to concrete objects in the child’s habitual surroundings.”⁷⁴ Luria calls these “associative meanings,” the dog with its leash, with its bark, linking the experience of a single dog with things associated in the child’s experience. The word “dog” brings to mind a succession of instantiations.

But the adult who speaks that word may be using it conceptually, referring to dogs in general, or with even more conceptual precision, as a species.⁷⁵ Returning to Vygotsky, “The child’s and the adult meanings of a word often ‘meet,’ as it were, in the same concrete object, and this suffices to ensure mutual understanding.”⁷⁶ This meeting becomes the source of subsequent learning, and progressive induction into an adult world of mediators that conceptualize – in image, writing, and the other forms of meaning.

In another phase of development, children begin to think in “complexes” with “the unification of scattered impressions; by organising discrete elements into groups, it creates the basis for later generalizations.” A “child’s use of ‘quah’ to designate first a duck swimming in the pond, then any liquid, including the milk in his bottle; when he happens to see a coin with an eagle on it, the coin is also called a ‘quah,’ and then any round, coin like object. This is typical of a chain complex [one amongst a number of varieties of thinking in complexes] – each new object included has some attribute in common with another element, but the attributes undergo endless changes.”⁷⁷

Then finally, concepts, or “categorical behavior,” to emphasize that this is a practical activity, and not just a manner of thinking.⁷⁸

A concept is more than the sum of certain associative bonds formed by memory, … a concept embodied in a word represents an act of generalization. But word meanings evolve. When a new word has been learned by the child, its development is barely starting; the word at first is a generalization of the most primitive type; as the child’s intellect develops, it is replaced by generalizations of a higher and higher type – a process that leads in the end to the formation of true concepts. The development of concepts, or word meanings, presupposes the development of many intellectual functions: deliberate attention, logical memory, abstraction, the ability to compare and to differentiate. These complex psychological processes cannot be mastered through the initial learning alone.⁷⁹

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⁶⁸ Lev Semyonovich Vygostky, 1934 [1986], Thought and Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 86–7.

⁶⁹ Lev Semyonovich Vygostky, 1930 [1999], “The Problem of Practical Intellect in the Psychology of Animals and the Psychology of the Child,” pp. 3–26 in Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky, Volume 6, edited by R.W. Rieber, New York, NY: Kluwer Academic, pp. 14–15.

⁷⁰ Lev Semyonovich Vygostky, 1962 [1978], Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 39.

⁷¹ Ibid., p. 108.

⁷² Ibid., p. 112.

⁷³ Ibid., pp. 54, 115.

⁷⁴ Lev Semyonovich Vygostky, 1934 [1986], Thought and Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 110.

⁷⁵ Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, 1981, Language and Cognition, New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons, p. 52.

⁷⁶ Lev Semyonovich Vygostky, 1934 [1986], Thought and Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 111.

⁷⁷ Ibid., pp. 135, 127.

⁷⁸ Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, 1981, Language and Cognition, New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 25–27, 37.

⁷⁹ Lev Semyonovich Vygostky, 1934 [1986], Thought and Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 149–50.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 105-107. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Lev Vygotsky and Aleksandr Luria on Children’s Concept Development §MS1.1.3b