Naming

Naming is the process of associating a lexical (i.e., word) label to a concept or object and involves selection at the semantic, lexical, phonologic, and phoneme levels. Naming and concept formation depend on the cognitive process of association, in this case, between auditory stimulation (i.e., word label) and other types of stimulation that convey the concept, namely, visual or tactile.

In the process of lexical development, a child acquires the capacity to name an object by hearing its name and associating it with the visual and tactile stimuli he or she receives from the object, establishing an association between a sound, stored as a phonological form, and a meaning, stored as a semantic representation. Naming difficulties may show up in discourse as reformulations, unnecessary repetitions, fillers, ...