Perhaps one can think of a sort of continuum where on one end you have a full understanding that it’s a characteristic of language that “everything has a name” as in the Anne Sullivan quote, and on the other end, an individual knows certain gestures are associated with getting another person to exhibit certain behaviors like bringing desired objects to them, but no intuition that there’s a whole system of gestures that they mostly haven’t learned yet (as an example, a cat might know that rattling its food bowl will cause its owner to come over and refill it). Even if Hellen Keller was not all the way on the latter end of the continuum at the beginning of the story—she could already request new gestures for things she regularly wanted Anne Sullivan to bring to her or take her to—in the course of the story she might have made some significant leap in the direction of the former end of the continuum. In particular she might have realized that she could ask for names of all sorts of things even if there was no regular instrumental purpose for requesting that Sullivan would bring them over to her (e.g. being thirsty and wanting water).
On the general topic of what the Helen Keller story can tell us about AI and whether complex sensory input is needed for humanlike understanding of words, a while ago I read an article at https://web.archive.org/web/20161010021853/http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_helen%20keller.html that suggests some reasons for caution. It notes that she was not born blind and deaf, but “lost her sight and hearing after an illness at the age of two”, so even if she had no conscious memory of what vision and hearing were like, they would have figured into her brain development until that point, as would her exposure to language to that age. The end of the article discusses the techniques developed in Soviet institutions to help people who were actually born blind and deaf, like developing their sense of space by “gradually making the deaf/blind child reach further and further for a spoon of food.” It says that eventually they can learn simple fingerspelt commands, and do basic bodily tasks like getting dressed, but only those children who lost their sight and hearing a few years after birth ever develop complex language abilities.
Perhaps one can think of a sort of continuum where on one end you have a full understanding that it’s a characteristic of language that “everything has a name” as in the Anne Sullivan quote, and on the other end, an individual knows certain gestures are associated with getting another person to exhibit certain behaviors like bringing desired objects to them, but no intuition that there’s a whole system of gestures that they mostly haven’t learned yet (as an example, a cat might know that rattling its food bowl will cause its owner to come over and refill it). Even if Hellen Keller was not all the way on the latter end of the continuum at the beginning of the story—she could already request new gestures for things she regularly wanted Anne Sullivan to bring to her or take her to—in the course of the story she might have made some significant leap in the direction of the former end of the continuum. In particular she might have realized that she could ask for names of all sorts of things even if there was no regular instrumental purpose for requesting that Sullivan would bring them over to her (e.g. being thirsty and wanting water).
On the general topic of what the Helen Keller story can tell us about AI and whether complex sensory input is needed for humanlike understanding of words, a while ago I read an article at https://web.archive.org/web/20161010021853/http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_helen%20keller.html that suggests some reasons for caution. It notes that she was not born blind and deaf, but “lost her sight and hearing after an illness at the age of two”, so even if she had no conscious memory of what vision and hearing were like, they would have figured into her brain development until that point, as would her exposure to language to that age. The end of the article discusses the techniques developed in Soviet institutions to help people who were actually born blind and deaf, like developing their sense of space by “gradually making the deaf/blind child reach further and further for a spoon of food.” It says that eventually they can learn simple fingerspelt commands, and do basic bodily tasks like getting dressed, but only those children who lost their sight and hearing a few years after birth ever develop complex language abilities.