The Intellectual Function of Syntagma in Preschool Children

According to Vygotsky’s approach to the thinking-speech problem, a thought and a word do not exist separately but are sublated with a word meaning. Due to the fact that all meanings develop through connections with each other, the main goal of this paper is to test the hypothesis that the special tool for these conceptual combinations is a syntagma. The experiment was conducted, where 33 preschool children (11 boys, 22 girls; Mage = 66 months, SDage = 12 months) were asked to classify 63 cards into groups and name them. Based on the results, content for the experimental phase was selected. In the main group subjects needed to answer 30 specially constructed questions which motivated them to think categorically. In the control group there were also 30 questions but they were feature-based. After this every participant was asked to classify the cards again. The study revealed that the type of question does not influence changes in conceptual combinations. The correlational study demonstrated statistically significant positive associations between “subject + predicate” syntagma which consists of nouns and categorical change in conceptual combinations, between functional syntagmas and functional changes. The results allowed confirming the theoretical hypothesis that syntagma is the tool for conceptual combinations.