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The Growth of Word Meaning
We have just seen something of how the child discovers the basic word-like units of lan-guage. Children begin to understand a few of these words late in the first year
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The Growth of Word Meaning
We have just seen something of how the child discovers the basic word-like units of lan-guage. Children begin to understand a few of these words late in the first year of life, and start to talk themselves shortly thereafter, uttering such simple words as duck and spoon and bye-bye in appropriate contexts. How did they learn these meanings? The obvious answer appears to be that, once they have noticed a recurrent sound pattern—for exam-ple, the pattern r-a-b-i-t—they now look around the world to see which object or event is characteristically in view when that pattern of sound is heard. Aha! Rabbit! (Locke, 1690; Quine, 1960; Markman, 1994). But is such a procedure of matching up words to their extralinguistic circumstances really as easy as that? There are many reasons to suppose that the child’s path to word learning is strewn with problems (Figure 10.25). One major problem is that the child’s environment is complex and cluttered, so how can the baby decide what the caregiver’s utterance really refers to? Even if the baby correctly identifies, say, a rabbit in view when the adult is saying “rabbit,” what aspect of rabbit does the adult really have in mind? After all, whenever one sees a rabbit, one sees its ear, one sees something furry, and one necessarily sees an animal too. To which of these ideas is the adult’s word really referring (Chomsky, 1959; L. R. Gleitman, 1990; Quine, 1960)? By repeated observations of words in different situations one would expect children to get much of this con-fusion of words and things all sorted out (Locke, 1690; Smith & Yu, 2008; Xu & Tenenbaum, 2007). For instance, if the child is lucky, she may one day hear her father say “rabbit” while she is viewing an earless rabbit or a rabbit whose ears are hidden among the cabbages. This might get the word rabbit sorted out from the word ear. But disentangling all these things, parts, properties, actions, and so forth within the visible world certainly seems to pose a formidable problem. Yet in actual fact children are impressively accurate in their discovery of word meaning and the errors that do occur are short-lived. By the time the child has a 100-word vocabulary, he is almost always correct in using words to refer to things and events in much the way that adults do. A number of factors intersect to solve this task.
Understanding the young learner’s success in acquiring the word goes back to issues of sociality, the infant’s focus on the adult’s attentional state and communicative intent. We can see these effects in experiments where toddlers are taught new words (Figure 10.26; Baldwin, 1991). The child is shown a fascinating new toy and allowed to explore and play with it, whereupon the mother says excitedly, That’s a blicket! Wow,
a blicket! Will the child by a process of automatic association now thinkthat the name for this new toy is blicket? In fact, rather than jumping to this conclusion right away, most children appear to seek evi-dence that the mother was attending to the toy too. Upon hearing the mother’s voice, they immediately glance into her eyes (just as an adult would) to see if the mother herself was looking at the toy in the child’s hands (and thus, probably, referring to it and not to something else when she said blicket). If the mother was indeed looking at this toy, then, when tested later on, the children showed that they had learned the blicket label for the new toy. But if the mother had been looking elsewhere—say, into a bucket whose contents were not visible to the child—the children did not assign this new word as the toy’s name. Rather they thought it was the name for some-thing, so far unseen, inside the bucket. In short, even children under 2 years of age use social context, in this case the caregiver ’s attentional stance toward an event, as a critical guide in language learning (Figure 10.27). They do not form word-to-meaning associations if the social context of lan-guage use does not guide them to do so (Baldwin, 1991; see also P. Bloom, 2002; Frank, Goodman, & Tenenbaum, 2009; Medina, Trueswell, Snedeker, & Gleitman, 2008; Nappa, Wessel, McEldoon, Gleitman, & Trueswell, 2009).
Word learning is heavily influenced by the ways children think about and categorize objects and events in the world (Gordon, 2004; Rosch, 1978). This is reflected, for example, in the fact that young children acquire the basic-level words for whole objects (dog) before learning their parts (ear), superordinates (animal), or subordi-nates (Chihuahua). One might think this happens just because the basic-level wordsare used most frequently to children. But differential frequency does not seem to be the whole explanation. In some homes, the word Spot or Rex (specific names) is used much more often than dog (a basic-level term) for obvious reasons. And it is true that in this case the young learner will often come to use the word Spot before he learns to utter dog. But he first learns it as a basic-level term all the 