Discourse referents in infancy.

Abstract

Human infants connect conceptual descriptions to objects in the first year of their life. Here, we explore the cognitive architecture that supports this capacity. We propose that early in development, the connection from descriptions to objects is mediated by a representational format proprietary to human communication: discourse referents. Discourse referents, just like other object representations, represent entities, but instead of being maintained based on spatiotemporal characteristics, they are created and maintained in relation to communicative contexts. After establishing criteria for what it would mean for preverbal infants to entertain such discourse referents, we review the evidence from developmental psychology. We find support for the idea that, in communicative episodes, infants create representations of entities that are encoded from a shared discourse perspective and which can be displaced or entirely perceptually unavailable. We conclude that infants cannot only represent "entities at locations" but also "entities under discussion" and that conceptual descriptions early in development are primarily elicited by and applied to this latter format. In this framework, successful referential communication about perceptually available objects can be understood as involving correspondences between perceptually created object representations and discourse referents. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).