When you give them a name, a word for a thing, the word and the thing build into the brain as a single neural pattern, as a neural field network.  The brain does not build a neural network of the thing, its taste, touch, smell, feel and in quality, and all of that, and then in addition, add to it its name as though that's a separate item.  The name builds in as an integral part of the whole structure of knowledge, as Paget calls it.  A structure of knowledge is a neural pattern that results from the child's inner action with an object or an event of his physical world out there.  And the brain responds by creating those, particularly neural fields that can handle that kind of phenomena, and the way those fields interact with all the other fields.  And the name and the thing build as a single unit.

Let's look at the growth of language itself, and the relationship between word and thing.  I love the work of Tenbergen, not Tenbergen, Blurton Jones, working with Tenbergen, the Nobel laureate, in the cross cultural study of the pointing syndrome.  When the little child is in their own nest, they think anything is safe to interact with.  And just watch it, a child in a house, anything; they will just jump right in on it.  They want to taste it, touch it, smell it, feel it, and immediately say, what is that mamma, what is that daddy.  They are asking, that famous question comes up, what is that mamma, what is that daddy, is asking for a name label for the object.

Now, when you give them a name, a word for a thing, the word and the thing build into the brain as a single neural pattern, as a neural field network.  The brain does not build a neural network of the thing, its taste, touch, smell, feel and in quality, and all of that, and then in addition, add to it its name as though that's a separate item.  The name builds in as an integral part of the whole structure of knowledge, as Paget calls it.  A structure of knowledge is a neural pattern that results from the child's inner action with an object or an event of his physical world out there.  And the brain responds by creating those, particularly neural fields that can handle that kind of phenomena, and the way those fields interact with all the other fields.  And the name and the thing build as a single unit.

We call this concrete language, where the word doesn't stand for the thing, semanticist, you see, are quite right about much later speech, but here, the word doesn't stand for the thing, the word and the thing are the same to the early child.  Ask the two year old child to say the word hand, they move their hand when they say it.  Why?  Because hand means something very tangible, something very concrete.  They can't deal with abstractions at all.

Now, when you take the child out in the open, away from the nest, all mammalian animals respond the same way.  I think this is so fascinating.  When you take the child out in the open, and Jones did cross cultural studies of this, here is the mamma and the child.  The child spots an object out here, let's say, it's a dirty, nasty, old dog.  That's my favorite one.  The child will stop, if they have never seen one before, they stop, point toward the object, and silently turn around and stare at the caretaker, whoever it is, grandma, papa, mamma, whoever it is, and wait for some kind of a signal from the parent that they perceive this particular kind of an object.  Getting that, the child interacts with the object, to taste it, touch it, smell it, feel it, talk to it, et cetera, et cetera, and build, what we call, a sensory motor structure of knowledge of that object, and of course, immediately want to know, what is that mamma, unless mamma tells the child ahead of time.  

Now, let's suppose that it's a dirty, nasty, awful looking, old mongrel dog.  Mamma says, don't dare touch that dirty, nasty, mongrel, old dog.  Now, her acknowledgment of the dog is all the child needs.  This is the model imperative, again.  The child must perceive some kind of verification that the mother is interacting and perceiving this object.  In that case, the child rushes over to interact with the dirty, nasty, old dog.  Mamma saying don't, hasn't anything to do with it.  The child is impelled.  They are driven, by nature, to interact with the object and build a structure of knowledge of it.  

Now, the mother's emotional state of that, her horror, alarm, etc., etc., builds into the structure of knowledge as an integral part of it.  Her name for the object, dirty, nasty, old dog, is built into the structure of knowledge.  All that is without any evaluation on the part of the child.  If it's a beautiful flower and the mother smiles and the child rushes over to do what, to pull it off its stem, stuff it in his mouth, taste it, touch it, smell it, feel it, and so on, then it builds the mother's emotional state of approval into the structure of knowledge, that, along with the word flower.  

Now, this might seem a little bit extreme.  Let me interject at this point, one of the most interesting phenomena that Blurton Jones found, and that was what he called the hallucinatory capacity of the early child.  He found in so many hundreds of cases in his observations over years, all over the world, in which the child would point towards an object that he couldn't see and that, apparently, the mother couldn't see.  And the child would keep pointing and pointing, silently looking back, trying to get some response, and would not interact unless they get some kind of response from the mother.  But the mother can't make any response, neither positive nor negative, because she is not perceiving that object.  

Now, this is part of the brain's selectivity.  It selects out of an infinite realm of possibility, those phenomena which are shared by the parent.  So that high degree of selectivity by which we know the brain certainly does operate, is partly geared by the model imperative.  And, so what we perceive, and all, will be what that child perceives.  

Now, when that child grows up, and its child wants to interact with a certain category phenomena, that will not be part of that parent's perceptual system, and they won't give a response, and so we find that a culture or a tradition will screen from all infinite possibilities, those which then make up that cultural world view.  

Now, if we look at this phenomenon of word and thing as a single unit in the brain, it's unique to us as humans, so far as we know, what is its value.  It’s the most profound discovery, I think, of all evolutionary process, because if these are built in as the same neural structures, they refer to the same sensory maps of the brain, etc., it's all an integrated unit in the brain system, word and thing, what does this mean?  Well, the child will move hand when they say the word hand, they will automatically start to sit down if they say the word "sit down" at age two when they are just learning all this.  But, suppose you use the word in absence of the thing, okay, when the thing is not coming in through the sensory system, but the word is.  Again, here is a vibration which is going to resonate with a previously established vibratory set of responses in the brain pattern.  It will activate those, just the word, just the name itself, and in absence of the thing, what does the brain do?  It creates a facsimile of it.  It creates the next best substitute it can and we come up with what?   

The inner image.  The inner image in the absence of the exterior image.  And, so here is where word can stimulate and this stimulates, not the sensory motor system, not the emotional cognitive system, but the highest cortical systems of the brain, in their coordination with the other two brains, it stimulates the entire brain system to do what?  To create, out of its own processes, an image.  Do you see the profound difference?  Not just processing what the reptilian brain and all the other animal brains can do, but creating image that doesn't exist at all, but in response to a name of that thing as it does exist.  

Now, there are several things about this that will lead us into play and imagination.  As the adults use all of these words, what starts happening in the child's mind?  It starts responding with internal imagery in all cases that it can.  And that leads us to storytelling.  Or let's just look at table talk to the early child, our memories of a very little child, sitting at the table.  We had eight children in my family and nearly always a lot of guests, and so on, and it was a great big table and it would always be, seemed to me, always filled with a lot of people, and adult table talk.  I loved it.  I didn't understand any of it.  I loved it and I would see all these worlds that would form inside as my adults would talk around me.  
Now, that's because their descriptions triggered in my mind, what?  The internal images of what they were talking about.