UNIT 1 – SEMANTIC ACQUISTION

S.NO TOPIC

1. Semantic acquisition
- Definition
- Semantic development
Prelinguistic development
- Birth – 1 year
Linguistic development:
- One – two years
- Two – three years
- Three – four years
- Five - six years
2.
- Six – seven years
- Seven – nine years
Pre-school children semantic development:
- Process involved in word learning
- Pre-schoolers noun definition
- Pre-schoolers verb definition
- Interrogative / questions
- Temporal relations
- Physical relations
3. - Locational preposition
- Kinship terms

Early school age development:

- Vocabulary development
- Conceptual change
- Related cognitive processing
- Figurative language
- Metaphoric transparency or Literal-figurative relationship
- Metaphors and similes
4.
- Adolescent and adult language
5.
The relation between word and their referents

Theoretical perspectives on semantic development

- Learning theory
- Developmental theories
- The componential theory of meaning
- Truth conditional theory of meaning
 - Generative theory of meaning
6. - Contextual theory of meaning

Word Learning Strategies In Children:

- Innate biases make word learning efficient
- Perceptual and social cues for word learning
- Mapping as a process of word learning
7. - Association of lexical and semantic representation

Word learning errors in children

- Overextension and underextension
8.
- Two traditional theories

Influence of semantics on syntax

 SEMANTICS ACQUSITION
SEMANTICS DEFINITION:
Semantics is a system of rules governing the meaning or content of words and word
combinations.
Some units are mutually exclusive, such as man and woman; a human being is not usually
classified as both.
Other units overlap somewhat, such as female, woman, and lady. Not all females are women and
even fewer could be called ladies. The actual words or symbols used represent not reality itself
but our ideas or concepts about reality.
 The word semantics was coined by French linguist Michel Bréal

SEMANTIC ACQUSITION:
The semantic acquisition is the process of learning to encode and decode meaning. It is
the course of acquisition of words, their meanings and the link between them.
 This does not happen all at once. During the course of this process (semantic
development), children’s strategies for learning word meanings and relating them to one
another changes as their internal representation of language constantly grows and
becomes reorganized.
Pre-Linguistic development:
There is a strong link among comprehension, production, and cognition. A child’s cognitive conceptual
development is the primary tool for comprehension. Cognitive skills and language abilities are associated.
They develop in parallel fashion and are strongly related with underlying factors. For example, cognitive
development in infants and toddlers is strongly related to increased memory and to the ability to acquire
symbols in many areas, including language and gestures. At times, evidence of the correlation between
language and cognition is strong, especially during the first two years of life.
A significant difference in the cognitive levels of play exists between children who use no words and
those who use single words.
 The play of children beginning to combine words consists of combining two or more play
sequences and/or performing the same action on a sequence of entities.

Cognitive growth may have an especially important influence on early word combinations. Many of the
principles of cognitive learning can also be applied to language learning:
■ Selectively attending to perceptually important stimuli
■ Discriminating stimuli along different dimensions
■ Remembering stimuli
■ Classifying stimuli according to the results of the discriminations
Knowledge structures of two types are assumed to guide word acquisition:
1. event based knowledge 2. taxonomic knowledge (Sell, 1992)
  Event-based knowledge consists of sequences of events or routines, such as a birthday
party, that are temporal or causal in nature and organized toward a goal. These sequences
of events contain actors, roles, props, and options or alternatives. A child uses this
knowledge to form scripts or sets of expectations that aid memory, enhance
comprehension, and give the individual child a knowledge base for interpreting events.
 Event-based, or world, knowledge influences vocabulary acquisition and may be the basis
for taxonomic, or word, knowledge. Words are learned within a social context; their
meaning is found in a child’s representation of events.
 Taxonomic knowledge consists of categories and classes of words. New words are
compared categorically and organized for retrieval.
 Early words are first comprehended and produced in the context of everyday events. From
repeated use, the words themselves become cues for the event. For example, the words
bath and soap become cues for bathing, while cookie and juice represent snack. As the
child acquires more words, cookie, cracker, milk, and juice become things I eat, which
later evolves into the category food. Preschoolers rely on event-based knowledge, while
kindergarteners use more categorical script-related groupings such as things I eat. By age
7 to 10, children are using taxonomic categories, such as food (Sell, 1992)
Comprehension and Production:
The comprehension–production relationship is a dynamic one that changes with rates and levels
of development and different linguistic demands. The comprehension of presymbolic infants is
difficult to determine. An infant may look where mother looks, act on objects that mother
references, and imitate actions. These behaviors represent the infant’s strategies. The caregiver
interprets the child’s behavior as meaningful.
Comprehension and production of first words pose different problems. Obviously, a child does
not fully comprehend the word before he or she produces it. Full comprehension requires a
greater linguistic and experiential background than that of a year-old infant. Instead, event-based
knowledge is used by toddlers, or 12- to 24-month-olds, to form responses (Paul, 1990).
Up through age 2, comprehension is highly context-dependent (Striano, Rochat, & Legerstee,
2003)
Toddlers rely on the uses of objects and on routines for comprehension. Two strategies may be
used with objects:
1. Do-what-you-usually-do. Balls would be rolled, thrown, dropped, or passed back and
forth, no matter what the child heard. Young preschoolers use this “probable event”
strategy. If there is no obvious probable action, a child may respond randomly or use
basic syntactic relationships for comprehension.
2. Act-on-the-object-in-the-way-mentioned. Noting the action, the child would throw the
ball whether the caregiver said, “Now, you throw the ball,” or “Remember how Johnny
throws the ball in the baseball game?” Event knowledge is still important.
3. Verb comprehension may be acquired one verb at a time, moving from general verbs,
such as do, to more specific verbs, such as eat and sit. By 28 months, a child can use
word order for limited comprehension. By late preschool, children learning English
consistently use word order for comprehension, although they may still revert to event
knowledge. It is not until age 5 or 6 that children begin to rely consistently on syntactic
 and morphologic interpretation. By age 7 to 9, children are using language to acquire
more language, such as word definitions, and are more sensitive to phrases and
subordinate clauses and to connectors, such as before, after, during, and while.
The Experimenter: 7 to 12 Months:
SEMANTICS DEVELOPMENT FROM BIRTH TO ONE YEAR:
At 8 to 10 months of age, infants produce vegetative sounds (e.g. burping), sound play (e.g.
Coo-goo) and other behaviors (e.g. eye gaze) to which the adult infers a communicative intent.
Vegetative sounds such as cries and burps are also interpreted by the adult. The adult often
responds to these with language (Oh, you are hungry) and so begins the child’s journey onto a
road of linking the intention (pragmatics), the meaning (semantics) and the form (phonology,
morphology and syntax) of the language.
By about 10-12 months of age, Children progress from a period of babbling to a point at which
they begin to stabilize certain vocalizations around specific situations, events and objects. These

vocalizations have been termed as proto words, pre lexical forms and phonetically consistent
forms. These vocalizations do not resemble the adult productions. Primarily, children attempt to
communicate at this time for two purposes:
1. To regulate joint attention with the adult
2. To regulate joint action with the adult
At 12 months of age, children typically produce their first word. A true word has to have a
phonetic relationship to some adult word and the child must use the word consistently to mark a
particular situation or object (Owens, 1988).
Linguistic Development:

The Explorer: 12 to 24 Months

The Exhibitor:

The Expert: The School-Age Child:

ONE TO TWO YEARS OF AGE:
 This is the age range where great growth of semantics is seen. Around 18 months, the
child produces 50 words expressively.
 By 24 months of age, the child should produce expressively between 150-300 words.
 The child verbalizes immediate experiences and starts frequent lexical categories of verbs
(run, eat) and nominals (grandma, doggy). They tend to produce overextensions (eg, all
round items as ball) and underextensions (only oreo is a cookie)
 They also begin to use some adjectives (eg. Hot, cold).
 They start to use semantic relations, or utterances that reflect meaning based on
relationship between words (eg, cause-effect-relationship). They being with oneword
utterances and gradually progress to two word utterances.

TWO TO THREE YEARS OF AGE:

 The child comprehends about 2,400 words and begins to ask simple “wh” questions. At
30 months of age the child’s expressive vocabulary is about 200-600 words on an average
425 words.
  At 36 months of age the child has comprehension of about 3600 words and can express
about 900-1000 words.
 The child can comprehend one to two step commands some concrete special and
temporal concept, plurals, pronouns and “wh” questions and stories.

THREE TO FOUR YEARS OF AGE:

 At 36 months the child will have expressive vocabulary of about -900 to 1000 words.
 At 42 months the child will comprehend upto 4,200 words and at 48 months the child
will comprehend upto 5,600 words.
 The child will able to understand some common opposites (eg: day/light, fast/slow)
 They will be able to tell state their full name, the name of the street they live in, and
several nursey rhymes.
 The child can relate experiences and tell about activities in a sequential order.
 Learns to answer questions appropriately- simple “what” questions
 Most of the child understand preschool stories and comprehend concepts of more/less,
next, big/little, infront of, back, empty/full, hard/soft.
 They should understand agent- action relationships (Tell me what swims, bites, flies etc.)
 Taxonomic organization is based on associations or classifications in which items share
features that define them as a class. E.g., for the word wagon, taxonomic responses would
include car, truck, bus, etc.
FOUR TO FIVE YEARS OF AGE:
 At 48 months of age the child uses 1,500 to 1,600 words expressively. Then comprehends
about 2,500 to 2,800 words. By 54 months of age the child comprehends approximately
6,500 by 60 months of age. They can comprehend upto 9,600 words. They can name
items in a category (eg, food, animals)
 Primary colours are achieved and label some coins. Most children use pronouns,
including possessives (eg, mine, his, her). The child uses ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions
 If the child comes from home/ preschool environment where time is referenced they will
understand concepts such as “early in the morning, tomorrow, after.”
 The child can define common words (eg, What is a ball?). The child begins to understand
right and left on himself but has difficulty telling right and left others.
 The child can identify objects by use and function (eg, Show me which one gives us
milk) The child can also identify past and future verbs (eg, show me the girl who threw
the ball, who will throw the ball)

FIVE TO SIX YEARS OF AGE:

 The typically developing 5 to 6 years has an expressive vocabulary of approximately
2,000 words. By 6 years of age the child comprehends 13,000 to 15,000 words. The child
knows spatial relationship/ prepositions such as ‘on top, behind, near’ and can distinguish
“alike, same- different” and understands opposites (eg, what is the opposite of cold?) The
 5-6 years old knows concepts such as yesterday/ tomorrow, more/less, some/many,
before/ after, now/ then. They can state complete address.
 They can name days of the week in order, and months of the year. Define objects by
composition and use (eg napkins are made of paper, you wipe your mouth with them).
 The child can tell long story and can retell tales of past and present events, and creates
imaginary stories. The child can state similarities and differences between objects and
name their position (first, second, third)

SIX TO SEVEN YEARS OF AGE:

 The child expresses about 2,600 words. Their receptive vocabulary is about 20,000
words. They can count 100 by rote memory and tells time related to a specific daily
schedule.
 Writing, they form letters from left to right, reversals are common (‘b’ instead of ‘d’).
They can print the alphabet and numerals from previously printed model and also can
match capital letters and match lower to uppercase letters.

SEVEN TO NINE YEARS OF AGE:

 The children around this age they enjoy telling stories and anecdotes. They can retell a
story, keeping the main ideas in correct sequence. They start use some figurative
languages and describe things in detail. They readily verbalise problems and ideas.
 Thematic organization is based on the associations that relate words to some integrated
context in which they are experienced as a whole. E.g., when asked to think of words that
go with ‘school’, children exhibiting thematic associations might respond with the words
teacher, friends, playground, games, etc.
 Semantic networks: A web of related words and concepts interconnecting individual
words in a variety of ways.

Metalinguistic abilities, or meta - awareness skill is to do with the ability of a person to

reflect on and consciously ponder about oral and written language and how it is used.
Meta is an ancient Greek term, meaning 'beyond.' In the context of language learning
'meta' can be interpreted as going beyond communication and meaning, and focusing
attention on the underlying structures.
E.g: blending, rhyming, segmentation, etc

Pre-school semantic development:

- The preschool period is one of rapid lexical and concept acquisition. It is estimated
that a child adds approximately five words to his or her lexicon or personal dictionary
every day between the ages of 11⁄2 and 6 years. Word meanings are inferred without
direct teaching by adults.
- Several factors influence children’s knowledge of words between 16 and 30 months
of age.
- In general, children know
 - ■ More words composed of low-probability sounds and sound pairs.
- ■ Shorter words with high neighbourhood density.
- ■ Words that were semantically related to other words. (Storkel, 2009)
- Although the effect of phonology is constant across age, the effect of lexical and
semantic variables changed with the relation of new words to existing words
becoming more important with age.
- Researchers have identified a vocabulary spurt, a rapid increase in the number of
words learned that occurs around the age of 18 months. A vocabulary spurt may be
evident for some children, but research has shown that not all children display an
abrupt increase in their production of words (Ganger & Brent,2004)
At age 2, several processes seem to be involved in word learning:
- Word Frequency: There is a strong relationship between the frequency of mothers’ use
of content words at 16 months and the age at which a child produces a word. More
frequent words are produced earlier.

- Word Segmentation: Word segmentation or dividing words into phonemes and

morphemes is simplified when mothers place words in highly salient or easily noticeable
or important positions, such as the final position in an utterance (Aslin, 1999; Choi, 2000;
Choi & Gopnik, 1995; Shady & Gerken, 1999; Smiley & Huttenlocher, 1995; Tardif et
al., 1997).
o For example, mothers use the final position to highlight new or unfamiliar words
(Cleave & Kay-Raining Bird, 2006; Fernald & Mazzie, 1991). In addition,
mothers place unfamiliar nouns in shorter utterance than familiar nouns.

- Fast Mapping: Fast mapping is the initial word-referent relationship or word “meaning”
created by a child based on limited exposure to a word (Bedore & Leonard, 2000;
Houston-Price et al., 2005; Kay-Raining Bird & Chapman, 1998; Merriman, Marazita, &
Jarvis, 1995).
- It is possible that a preschool child employs initial- or fast-mapping strategy that enables
him or her to infer a connection between a word and its referent or entity referred to after
only one exposure. Obviously, only a small portion of the overall meaning goes into a
child’s memory after only one exposure. The actual information is affected by both the
world and word knowledge of a pre-schooler.
- Not all words are learned with the same ease. In general, nouns seem to be easier to fast
map than verbs.
- Words may be fast-mapped using one or more of the following strategies (Storkel, 2001):
- The range of possible meanings may be constrained by the situation and also by the
meanings already possessed by a child (Golinkoff et al., 1994; Waxman &
Kosowski,1990). Using reasoning similar to the novel name–no name strategy, a child
would reason that the definition cannot be the same as one already possessed.
 - An associational strategy might be used in which the regularities in the language, such as
word order and bound morphemes, give him or her clues as to the meaning (Samuelson &
Smith, 1998; Schafer & Plunkett, 1998).
- A child may use phonotactic probability or the likelihood of occurrence of different
sound sequences to aid rapid recall of newly learned words (Storkel, 2002, 2003).
- Fast mapping may be the first in a two-step process of lexical acquisition. First, the child
roughs out a tentative definition connecting the word and available information.
- This step may be followed by an extended phase in which a child gradually refines the
definition with new information acquired on subsequent encounters. Retrieval may be
affected by the nature of the referent, the frequency of exposure to the word, the form and
content of the utterance in which it occurs, and the context
Pre-schoolers’ noun definitions often include

- Physical properties, such as shape, size, and color

- Functional properties or what the entity does
- Use properties
- Locational properties, such as on trees or at the beach.
- Often missing are superordinate categories, as in a car is a vehicle; relationships to
other entities, as in a mouse is much smaller than a cat; internal constituents, as in an
apple has seeds inside; origins, as in hatch from eggs; Adult and older school-age
children’s definitions contain all these elements.
Preschool verb definitions
 -
- A pre-schooler can explain who or what does the action, to what or whom it’s done,
and where, when, and with what it’s done. Usually missing is how and why it’s done
and a description of the process found in full adult definitions.
- In languages as different as Korean and English, it appears that preschool children
learn novel verbs by noticing the differences, especially the objects used with each
verb (Childers & Paik, 2009).
- Verbs may be initially mapped based on the number and type of morphological
ending applied (Bedore & Leonard, 2000; Behrend, Harris, & Cartwright, 1995).
Children tend to use the -ing ending on action verbs and -ed on verbs denoting results
of events. In order to generalize verb meanings, a child must be able to extend the
verb to other outcomes and manners of action (Forbes & Poulin-DuBois, 1997)
- Although vocabulary growth between ages 1 and 3 years is positively related to the
diversity of words in the mother’s speech and to maternal language and literacy skills,
it is not related to the overall amount of maternal talkativeness (Pan, Rowe, Singer, &
Snow, 2005). Children also expand their vocabularies through parental storybook
reading.
- Even low levels of language participation, such as naming and describing, as well as
reasoning and making inferences, can have a positive effect on the child’s subsequent
language use (van Kleeck, Gillam, Hamilton, & McGrath, 1997).
- Relational terms acquisition of semantics is a complex process. The order of
acquisition is influenced by the syntactic complexity, the amount of adult usage in a
child’s environment, and the underlying cognitive concept.
Some relational terms include:
- Interrogatives or questions : Children’s responses to different types of questions
and their production of these same types have a similar order of development.
 - Early question forms include what and where, followed by who, whose, and which,
and finally by when, how, and why.
- Most of the later forms involve concepts of cause, manner, or time.
- Their late appearance can be traced to the late development of these concepts.
- In other words, a child must have a concept of time in order to comprehend or to
answer when questions.
- Occasionally, however, a pre-schooler responds to or asks questions without fully
understanding the underlying meaning. Children seem to be employing the following
answering strategy: If the word meaning is unknown, answer on the basis of the verb.
Unaware of the meaning of when, the child might respond to “When are you going to
eat?” with “A cookie!”
- Semantic features of the verb are particularly important for certain types of child
answers. For example, the verb touch is more likely to elicit a response focusing on
what was touched, where it was touched, and for what reason regardless of the
question.
- Preschool children rely heavily on contextual information when answering questions
and become increasingly better at integrating this information with linguistic cues
(Ryder & Leinonen, 2003).
- “why”-type, questions may be especially difficult for a preschool child because of the
reverse-order thinking required in the response. The 3-year-old child experience’s
difficulty reversing the order of sequential events. Yet it is this type of response that
is required for the why interrogative. For example, “Why did you hit Randy?”
requires a response explaining the events that preceded the fist fight. It is not unusual
to hear a 3-year-old respond “Cause he hit me back,” a consequence, demonstrating
an inability to reverse the order.
Temporal relations :
- Temporal terms such as when, before, since, and while can convey information on the
order, duration, and simultaneity of events. The order of acquisition of these terms is
related to their use and to the concept each represents.
- In general, words of order, such as after and before, precede words of duration, such
as since and until. This hierarchy reflects a sequence of cognitive development.
- Preschool children gain a sense of order before they have a sense of duration. Five-
year olds understand before and after better than simultaneous terms such as at the
same time.
- Temporal terms are initially produced as prepositions and then as conjunctions
joining clauses. Thus, the child will produce a sentence such as “You go after me”
before he says, “You can go home after we eat dinner.” It is not uncommon for even
6 1 ⁄2-year-olds to have difficulty with some of the syntactic structures used with
before and after to link clauses.
- The child adopts a strategy in which the main clause becomes the first event. For
example, the sentence “After arriving home, Oz bought a paper” would be interpreted
as “Oz bought a paper, then he arrived home.”
- When all else fails, a child relies on knowledge of real-life sequences. For example,
‘you wake up before eating breakfast’. This strategy of comprehension works as long
 as the utterance conforms to a child’s experiential base. Pre-schoolers generally do
not follow multiple directions well, as in “First do X, then Y, and then Z.”
- Children 31 ⁄2 to 5 years of age often omit one of the steps. This behaviour may be
more common than order reversal and may reflect the limited short-term memory and
cognitive-processing capacity of preschool children.
Physical relations :
- Relational terms such as thick/thin, fat/skinny, more/less, and same/different are
frequently difficult for preschool children to learn.
- In general, a child first learns that the terms are opposites, then the dimensions to
which each term refers. The order of acquisition may be based on semantic–syntactic
relations and the cognitive relations expressed.
- Less specific terms such as big/little refers to general size on any dimension would
acquired before more specific terms such as deep/shallow, which refer physically to
bodies of water.
- The positive member, such as big or long, of each relational pair, as in big/little and
long/ short, represents the presence of the entity that it describes (size and length,
respectively) and is learned first. The presence of size is big, the positive term. The
negative aspect or the absence of size is little. The child seems to learn by
accumulating individual examples of each term. Hence, understanding may be
restricted to specific objects even if it appears to be more adultlike.
- Learning and interpretation of descriptive terms is dependent on context. For
example, 2-year-olds understand big and little used in comparing the size of two
objects or judging an object’s size for a particular task. It is more difficult for a child
to recall the size of a non-present entity.
- Terms such as more/less and same/different pose a different problem for a preschool
child. There may be an underlying concept for more/less in which a young preschool
child interprets both terms to mean amount. When presented with a selection task,
pre-schoolers tend to pick the larger grouping, whether cued with more or with less.
- Conceptual development seems equally important for the acquisition of same and
different. The ability to make same/different judgments seems to be related to
development of conservation, the ability to attend to more than one perceptual
dimension without relying strictly on physical evidence. Without this ability, young
pre-schoolers experience difficulty making same/different distinctions.
Locational prepositions:
- A child understands different spatial relations before beginning to speak about them.
- The exact nature of that comprehension is unknown, since a child as old as 3 1 ⁄2 still
relies on gestures to convey much locational meaning.
- The first English prepositions, in, on, and to appear at around 2 years of age. When a
child does not comprehend these prepositions, he or she seems to follow these
interpretive strategies: If it’s a container, something belongs inside and if it’s a
supporting surface, something belongs on it. Thus, children may respond in relation
to the objects mentioned rather than the prepositions used. Other possible interpretive
cues may be the word order of adult utterances and the context.
 - Using these rules, children respond in predictable ways. Children 18 months of age
seem to base their hypotheses about word meanings on these strategies. As a result,
they act as if they understand in all the time, on with surfaces but not containers, and
under not at all.
- By age 3, most children have figured out the meanings of all three prepositions.
- When 3- and 4-year-olds are faced with more complex prepositions such as above,
below, in front of, or at the bottom of, however, they tend to revert to these strategies
again.
- Terms such as next to or in front of offer special problems. These terms differ in
relation to the locations to which they refer.
- With fronted objects, such as a chair or a digital monitor, locational terms take their
reference from the object. For example, in front of the TV means in front of the
screen.
- With non-fronted objects, such as a saucer, the term takes its location from the
speaker’s perspective. Interpretation requires a certain level of social skill on the part
of the listener, who must be able to adopt the perspective of the speaker.
- Next to is usually learned at about 40 months, followed by behind, in back of, and in
front of around age 4.
- Syntactic form may also affect acquisition. Prior to age 4, in, on, and over often are
used predominantly as prepositions for object location while up, down, and off are
used both as locational prepositions and verb particles. A verb particle is a multiword
grammatical unit that functions as a verb, such as stand up, sit down, and take off.
Thus, there is opportunity for confusion and a lack of consistency.
Kinship terms:
- A pre-schooler gains very limited knowledge of kinship terms that refer to family
members, such as dad, sister, and brother.
- At first a child treats the term as part of the person’s name. For a while, my children
called me “daddybob.”
- Next, a child gains some features of the definition of the person but not of the
relationship. For example, “A grandmother is someone who smells like flowers and
wears funny underwear” (an actual child’s definition).
- A child gains a few of the less complex relationships first. Complexity may be
thought of as the number of shared features. For example, father has the features male
and parent, but aunt, a more complex term, has female, sister, and parent of whom
she’s the sister.
- After Mommy and Daddy, the child learns brother and sister. Roughly, the meanings
are brother- related boy and sister - related girl.
- By age 4, a child may understand what a brother or sister is but doesn’t realize that he
or she can also be a brother or sister to someone else.
- Eventually, a child will understand all features of the kinship terms and reciprocity.
Most of the major kinship terms are understood by age 10.
Early school-age development:
 - During the school-age period and adult years, an individual increases the size of his
or her vocabulary and the specificity of definition. Gradually, a child acquires an
abstract knowledge of meaning that is independent of particular contexts or individual
interpretations.
- The new organization is reflected in the way the child uses word. This entire process
of semantic growth, beginning in the early school years, may be related to an overall
change in cognitive processing.
- Vocabulary Growth
- Conceptual Change
- Related Cognitive Processing
- Figurative Language
Vocabulary development:

 Vocabulary development is a commonly used measure of language development.

 The first word occurs around 1 year of age and, by the time toddlers are 18 months,
they approximately 50 words (Nelson, 1973). Significantly, most toddlers begin
combining words at this point. This relationship may have suggested the importance of
learning words in relation to overall language development. The child’s vocabulary
appear to include words from a variety of grammatical classes and their first 50 words
represent all of the major grammatical classes found in adult language,

 In preschoolers,
 Age  Vocabulary
 18-24  50 to 200-
months 300 words
 3 years  900- 1000
words
 5 years  2,100-
2,200 words
(Owens, 1996)
 Children have been estimated to add new words to heir expressive vocabulary at rates
of two to five new words per day during the preschool years (Owens, 1996; Pease &
Berko Gleason, 1985).
 Age  Vocabulary
 6 years  14,000
words
(Carey, 1978)
 During the second year of life, children start learning approximately one word per
week and then one word per day. After the initial outset and throughout the first 5 years
of life, this rate accelerates intensely, so that children learn an average of one new word
every two waking hours (Tomasello, 2003). Some researchers have identified a
 vocabulary spurt, a rapid increase in the number of words learned that occurs around
the age of 18 months. A vocabulary spurt may be evident for some children, but
research has shown that not all children display an abrupt increase in their production
of words (Ganger & Brent,2004)

Creative Vocabulary:

Occasionally a child is confronted with a situation in which relevant word is simply not known
or cannot be recalled, but some association word might come. At these times, preschoolers have
been observed to invent words out of the association that seems to convey the meaning in an
innovative way. These instances have been called invented words (Pease & Berko Gleason,
1985) and idiomorphs (Reich, 1986). E.g., plant-man for gardener or in sentence while putting
crackers in her soup, child may say “I’m crackering my soup.”

Semantics is a term used to describe the study of meaning in language. When this component of
language is affected then it is termed as ’SEMANTIC DISABILITY’.
There are broadly 2 different ways that meaning has been studied in language development. One
branch of study known as lexical semantics and the second branch known as semantic
relations.
LEXICAL SEMANTICS: Study of meaning of words in a language. The words that comprise
in a language are known collectively as the lexicon and hence the branch of semantics concerned
with word meaning is called lexical semantics.
It is not concerned with which word a child knows and uses (i.e., vocabulary) but with the way
that children use their vocabulary to refer to things. So during the acquisition of lexical
semantics, child can produce 2 types of errors:
OVEREXTENSION:
When a word used in an overgenerous/ over inclusive way and applied to a larger class of
referents (similar in terms of perceptual feature or function) than is normal in adult usage.
Ex: Child may refer: To all 4 legged animals as ‘cats’
To all men as ‘daddy’ etc
UNDEREXTENSION:
Word is applied in an over-restricted or narrow way i.e words narrowing the meaning of referent.
Ex: the use of the word dog only when referring to the child’s pet, and not when referring to
other dogs.
Clark (1973) has estimated that overextensions and under extensions occur frequently and can
represent as much as one third of a child’s early vocabulary between the ages of one and two
years.
Two traditional theories attempt to explain extension errors:
First, the semantic feature hypothesis (Clark, 1973) states that children classify and organize
referents in terms of perceptual features such as size, shape, texture, etc. This phenomenon
explains overextensions in which a child generalizes a word based on perceptual similarity (e.g.
ball- moon).
Second, the functional core hypothesis (Nelson, 1974) states that words are overextended
because of the actions or functions performed using objects rather than the perceptual features of
the referents. The concept of doll consists of many objects. You play with a doll, feed it etc.
objects are looked at for the function, not by perceptual features.
SEMANTIC RELATIONS: Relationship between the words at the level of sentence. The
meaning of a sentence is derived from its grammar as well as on the meanings of individual
words.
Words are semantically related to each other in different ways. The terms that are used to
describe these relations often end with the suffix –nym.
Types of semantic relations:
ANTONYMY:
The term antonym is used to describe oppositeness of meaning (Palmer, 1996). It is the most
useful tool of inter-lexical sense relations. It expresses a kind of relation that exists between
words or sentences that are mutually contradictory (Kreidler Charles 1998).
For eg: old x young, male x female etc.
SYNONYMY:
Synonymy in semantics is an inter-lexical sense relation. It is sameness of meaning.
Ex: Intelligent: Smart, Bright, Brilliant and Sharp
Beautiful: Attractive, Pretty, Lovely, Stunning etc.

HYPONYMY
Hyponymy involves the logical relationship of inclusion. For instance, the meaning of “animal”
is included in the meaning of lion, goat, dog and so on. The term “animal” is the upper term
known as the SUPERORDINATE while the lower term is called the HYPONYM.

Super ordinate Terms Hyponyms

Reptiles lizards, geckos, snakes, chameleons, Crocodiles
Color blue, red, green, white, yellow.
Stationery books, pencils, rulers
MERONYMY:
A term that is used to describe a part-whole relationship between lexical items. A has B means
that B is part of A.
Arm, leg, body, elbow, hand, and finger are all meronyms of human.
Cover, and page are meronyms of book,
Root and stem are meronyms of a plant.
HOMONYMY:
A semantic relation that describes a word that has unrelated senses. There are two types of
homonymy:
Homophones: when words have the same pronunciation regardless their spelling with different
senses. Ex: night and knight, not and knot.
Homographs: words that have the same spelling regardless their pronunciation with different
senses. Ex: bat - a piece of sporting equipment /a bird.
lead - to go first with followers behind/a type of metal
minute - 60 seconds /extremely small
POLYSEMY: It is a word that is derived from the Greek word poly (many) and semi (related to
meaning). A word or an expression that has multiple meanings that are related conceptually or
historically. It is also called radiation or multiplication
Examples: guard a. a person who guards
b. a group of soldiers
c. a person who is in charge of a train
bank a. financial institution
b. side of the river

Conceptual change:
- Adults organize language, especially object concepts in various ways. Two prominent
organizational schemes are taxonomies and themes.
- Taxonomies are categories of objects that share a common essence, such as trees or tools.
Although objects in a category likely share similar perceptual features, mature taxonomic
 knowledge includes other aspects such as functional use or biological essence (Carey,
1988, 1991; Medin & Ortony, 1989; Springer & Keil, 1991).
- Objects related by themes are bound by an event. For example, gifts, a birthday cake, and
party hats are part of a birthday party scheme. Objects are related based on space, such as
cake and presents in the same room; cause, such as candles and the birthday child to blow
them out; and function, such as knife and cake (Lin & Murphy, 2001).
- Although mature definitions contain both taxonomic and thematic information,
taxonomic knowledge is more readily accessible for both children and adults (Whitmore,
Shore, & Hull Smith, 2004).
- In young children, more abstract taxonomic relations are more fragile than thematic ones
in their mental representation.
- By age 6, children organize concepts in ways similar to adults, and this organization is
based on more than physical similarity (Hashimoto, McGregor, & Graham, 2007).
- Within two years, categorical relations seem to be the preferred method of organization.
Over time and with more encounters with the word, thematic knowledge gradually
increases (Chaffin, Morris, & Seeley, 2001).
- Education may play a part as well. For example, uneducated adults seem to rely less on
taxonomic organization than do children who have completed grade school. With
development and education, taxonomic structures strengthen and are less affected by the
task or context.
- Taxonomic organization is promoted by compare and contrast activities in the classroom
and by exercises requiring synonyms and antonyms. Likewise, verbal definitions may
increase categorical knowledge because definitions often begin with categorical
affiliation, as in “An apple is a fruit.”

Related cognitive processing:

- The increasing reliance on linguistic categorization allows the child to process greater
amounts of linguistic information.
- Several factors affect vocabulary acquisition:
- First, both children and adults use a strategy of “chunking” semantically related
information into categories for remembering. Thus, seventh-graders rely more on
chunking for recall than do first-graders.
- Second, the use of semantic relations resolves word ambiguities. For example, (there,
their, and they’re) sound very similar and could be confused, except for the very different
semantic relations they represent.
- Third, categorical structures are stored hierarchically.
- Individuals may use several levels of linguistic processing simultaneously:
- Surface—syntactic rules and phonetic strings
- Deep—semantic categories and relations
- Contextual—situation or image
 - During early school years, children show a shift in linguistic processing from reliance on
surface to reliance on deep strategies. This shift may mirror gradually decreasing
cognitive reliance on visual input for memory and recall, a gradual change from visual
encoding by pre-schoolers to overt naming as the dominant memory process of school-
age children.
- Kindergarteners also employ a naming strategy to enhance recall. Dependence on visual
input for recall does not appear to lessen greatly until approximately age 9.
- The processing shift may also reflect a child’s increasing ability to integrate situational
nonlinguistic information with linguistic information. These abilities are needed for
effective daily communication. An example is the use of stress or emphasis in sentence
decoding. There is a progression in the ability to use stress cues throughout elementary
school and into the teenage years.
- Children may begin to employ these strategies as early as age 5.

Figurative language:
- A school-age child also develops figurative language, which enables use of language
in a truly creative way.
- Figurative language is words used in an imaginative sense, rather than a literal one, to
create an imaginative or emotional impression. Figurative language enriches and
enlivens our communication and is used to convey information that may be
inexpressible or less effectively expressed in literal language.
- Preschool children do not understand the nonliteral meanings of sarcasm and irony.
- Sarcasm is directed at a target, usually another person, “Those are nice shoes,”
indicating dislike. A pre-schooler is likely to reply, “Thanks, my mommy got ’em for
me.”
- Irony is not directed specifically as in “Great weather” when it is pouring rain
- Although 5- to 6-year-olds are beginning to understand that the nonliteral meanings
of sarcasm and irony do not distinguish the speaker’s intention.
- The primary types of figurative language include idioms, metonyms, metaphors,
similes, and proverbs. These colourful terms are not learned as part of a rule system
and cannot be interpreted literally. They are acquired through continual use, and their
meanings are inferred from context.
- Metaphorically transparent idioms are easier for children and adults to interpret than
metaphorically opaque ones.
- Metaphoric transparency or Literal-figurative relationship, directly affects ease
of interpretation.
- Eg; Idiom such as hold your tongue (meaning directly related to speaking and to the
tongue)
- In contrast, beat around the bush and kick the bucket (do not have closely related
meanings) and are therefore Metaphorically opaque.
- Metonyms are figures of speech in which an individual example stands in for a whole
category of things, such as “All hands on deck,” in which hands stands for sailors.
- Metaphors and similes are figures of speech that compare actual entities with a
descriptive image. In a metaphor, a comparison is implied, such as “The smoke was
cotton balls billowing from the chimney”.In contrast, a simile is an explicit
comparison, usually introduced by like or as, such as “He ran like a frightened
rabbit.”
- Preschool children produce many inventive figures of speech, such as the following
examples (Gardner & Winner, 1979):
- A bald man is described as having a “barefoot” head.
- A folded potato chip is described as a “cowboy hat.”
- Children as young as age 3 can produce intentional, appropriate, descriptive
metaphors (Gottfried, 1997). There is significant development of metaphorical
expressions in later preschool years.
- Metaphors become less frequent, if more appropriate, in spontaneous speech after age
6.
- Two possible reasons for this decline are 1st, that the child now has a basic
vocabulary and is less pressured to stretch his or her vocabulary to express new
meanings and, 2nd that the rule-guided linguistic training of school leaves little room
for such creativity.
- Both the quantity and quality of metaphors in creative writing increases in later
elementary school. Comprehension of figurative language increases with age.
- The 8- to 9-year-old is beginning to appreciate the psychological process. A child still
misinterprets the metaphor, however, because he or she does not fully understand the
psychological dimension. In contrast, the older school-age child is able to make
metaphoric matches across several sensory domains. For example, colours can be
used to describe psychological states, as in “I feel blue.”
- Proverbs, are very difficult for young school-age children to comprehend.
- The 6-, 7-, or 8-year-old child interprets proverbs quite literally. Development of
comprehension continues throughout adolescence.
- The ability to comprehend proverbs is strongly correlated with perceptual analogical
reasoning ability.
- A child attempting to comprehend a proverb must understand the underlying
relationships between the proverb and the context. Both figurative language
comprehension and analogical reasoning are strongly related to receptive vocabulary
development, underscoring the semantic link between these skills.
- Accuracy in interpreting idioms and proverbs slowly increases throughout late
childhood and adolescence.
- Idiom learning is closely associated with familiarity and with reading and listening
comprehension skills (Nippold, Moran, & Schwarz, 2001).
 - Development of individual figurative expressions varies widely and depends, among
other things, on world knowledge, learning context, and metaphoric transparency.
- World knowledge is related to a general ability to interpret figurative expressions. For
example, smooth sailing and fishing for a compliment have more meaning if you’ve
sailed or fished.
- The figurative and literal interpretations of figurative language may be processed in
simultaneous but separate processes (Cronk & Schweigert, 1992). The figurative
meaning most likely is stored in the child’s lexicon as a single unit. The less
frequently the expression is accessed, the more difficult it is to locate.

Adolescent and adult language:

- Age, metalinguistic ability, and educational level are all important for the production
of well-structured formal definitions (Benelli et al., 2006).
- In general, adult definitions are more abstract than child definitions. They tend to be
descriptive, with concrete terms or references to specific instances used to modify the
concept.
- Frequency of a word’s use may be a relatively more important factor in development
of definitions by teens and young adults for some types of words, such as adjectives
(Marinellie & Johnson, 2003). Unlike child meanings, adult definitions are
exclusionary and also specify what an entity is not. Adult definitions also reflect an
individual’s personal biases and experiences.
- Supplying word definitions is a metalinguistic skill. In general, both quantitative and
qualitative improvement in definitions occurs in adolescence.
- Figurative language will be a challenge into adulthood. For preteens and adolescents,
idioms that are more familiar, supported by context, and more transparent are easier
to understand than those that are less familiar, isolated or out of context, and more
opaque (Nippold & Taylor, 1995; Nippold, Taylor, & Baker, 1995; Spector, 1996).
These factors are also important in the interpretation of proverbs (Nippold & Haq,
1996).
- As children move from childhood through adolescence to adulthood, definitions
include more critical elements and related or associated concepts.

The Relations between Words and their Referents:

Referent and Word:
 A referent is what a word or symbol stands for. The referent is the object in the real world
that’s being referred to, so an actual chair would be the referent of the word chair. Thus a
symbol we use to refer to referent is word.
 The word is a sign that signifies a referent, but the referent is not the meaning of the
word. For example, you say to the child, “Look at the doggie”. The dog is the referent,
but not the meaning of doggie.
 The dog can be called doggie, Hund, Perro depending on whether one is speaking
English, German, Spanish or Mandarin. There is nothing intrinsic to dogs. The
relationship between the referent (the dog) and the sign for it (the word dog) is symbolic.
 Many children’s earliest words or proto-words have less than arbitrary relation to their
referents. Trains are called choo-choos and dogs bow –bow.
It is easier for children to learn a word that is obviously related to its referent than one
that is totally arbitrary.

Theoretical Perspectives On Semantic Development:

Learning theory:
 Learning theory predicts that repeated exposure to a stimulus, (For example- hearing the
parent say the word kitty.) paired with a particular experience, (seeing the family cat
appear) will result in the child associating the sound of the word kitty with the family cat.
Eventually, the infant will react to the word alone as if the cat were there.
 Learning theory may explain the earliest and simplest kinds of linking between words
and objects.
 According to Smith, 1999, children are especially sensitive to novelty in their
environment and predisposed to apply new words to new objects.

Exclusive reliance on associated learning, however would be slow, effortful, and idiosyncratic,
and result in many errors. Rather, early stages of children’s word learning are not slow and error
laden instead is rapid, predictable and remarkably accurate.

Developmental theories:
 Developmental theories consider semantic development within the wider context of the
child’s unfolding social, cognitive and linguistic skills. Children learn meanings of words
by drawing on skills in multiple domains.
 Clark (1993) theorizes that by the time they start learning language, all children have
developed a set of ontological categories (concept about how the world is organized).
 These ontological categories include objects, actions, events, relations, states and
properties.
 For instance: the baby hears the mother say words such as Rufus, dog, bone and look. An
infant may initially assume that the word dog applies only to the family dog. Eventually
children must come to understand that the single label can be applied to more than one
 specific case. Without this insight, infants cannot understand the nature of reference, or to
communicate about objects, actions and properties (Clark, 1993).
 Not only does the label dog refer to many different dogs, a particular dog may be labeled
in many ways. Moreover, when a child hears a new word, the word could refer to an
action such as barking, a property or state as sleeping, or even a part of an object, such as
the dog’s tail.

The Componential theory of meaning:

This theory based on the structural approach gives an account of word meaning. The total
meaning of a word is broken up into its basic distinct components. Each component of
meaning is expressed by a feature symbol with a + or – mark to indicate the presence or
absence of a certain feature.
HUMAN: + Human (human being)
-Human (animal)
ADULT: +ADULT (adult)
-ADULT (young)
MALE: + MALE (male)
-MALE (female)
Subsequently the meanings of some individual words can be expressed by the combinations of
these features:
Man: +HUMAN+ADULT+MALE
Woman: +HUMAN+ADULT-MALE
Boy: +HUMAN-ADULT+MALE
Girl: +HUMAN-ADULT-MALE
The meaning of each word is understood as a combination of these ultimate contrastive elements.
It may be noted that componential analysis of this kind treats components in terms of binary
opposites, i.e. ‘+’ and ‘-’features. It can help us to bring out logical features which are inherent in
a word. This analysis can help us understand the meaning relations such as synonym and
antonym. These can be understood as meaning inclusion (including of similar meanings being
similarity relation) and meaning exclusion (contrasting relations)
For example, the meaning of the ‘child’ is given by contrast meaning in which
CHILD=+HUMAN-ADULT-MALE or +MALE
While many meanings can be understood in terms of binary contrasts, there are some oppositions
that involve more than two terms. Eg., animal species, plants types of metals, colours etc. These
examples are called as instances of multiple taxonomy by Leech (1981).
There are instances of contrasts between some antonyms eg, rich/poor, old/ young, deep/ shallow
in which we have various stages between two extremes. Thus while we cannot say ‘John is
married or unmarried’ because it is a contradictory but we can say ‘The man is neither rich nor
poor’ meaning that there is an intermediate stage between ‘rich and poor’. This kind of meaning
also brings in degree of relativity we can say ‘rich’ or ‘poor’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in relation to some
norm which may be specific for a speaker or a situation.
Symmetric relation: Ram is married to Sita which entails Sita is married to Ram
Asymmetric relation: Ram is the father of Mohan we cannot assume opposite.
Limitations: This theory does not explain about what are called ‘fuzzy meanings’ ie which are
vague and in which there is less agreement and certainity about exact nature of objects and
concepts.
Eg., Cup cannot be defined in terms of clear cut unvarying set attributes (with or without handle,
narrow or wide) whether there are so many types. This cup can be defined only in terms of
“fuzzy sets” since here are different types of cups.
Truth-conditional theory of meaning:
This theory was given by Leech (1981) and this theory takes up the account of meaning of
sentences.
Semantics main purpose is to explain the primary, conceptual aspect of meaning called
‘conceptual meaning’ or ‘logical meaning’ and this particularly has account to certain semantic
categories and relationships which apply to sentences: synonymy, entailment, contradiction,
semantic anomaly etc. These are particularly called as BASIC STATEMENTS because
semantics has to explain them by constructing theories.
This basic statement is the logical proposition which is either TRUE or FALSE. Its truth or
falsity is dependent or conditional upon the truth or falsity of other statements. eg., ‘John is in his
office’. This statement will be true if the statement ‘John is at home’ is false.
SYNONYMY: Statement X is synonymous with statement Y when if X is true, Y is also true; if
X is false, Y is also false. Thus ‘HE is married’ is synonymous with ’He has a wife’.
ENTAILMENT: Statement X entails statement Y when if true, Y is also true; if X is false, Y is
false. ‘He is married’ entails ‘He has a wife’. (Entailment and synonymy are similar.)
INCONSISTENT: Statement X is inconsistent with the statement Y when if X is true, Y is
false; if Y is true, X is false. ‘He is not married’ is inconsistent with ‘He has a wife’.
TAUTOLOGY: Statement X is invariable truth, eg, An orphan has no father.
CONTRADICTION: Statement X is invariably false, eg, A orphan has a father.
PRESUPPOSITION: Statement X presupposes statement Y when X is true, Y is false; if
negation of X is true, Y is true. ‘It pleases John that the weather is hot’ presupposes ‘the weather
is hot’.
ANOMALY OR ABSURDITY: Statement X is absurd in that it presupposes a contradiction,
eg, ‘The orphan’s father is at home’ presupposes that ‘The orphan has a father’ which is
contradiction, and therefore absurd. A native language speaker can infer the truth of other
propositions. The speaker knows the conditions in which a particular sentence is true. These
conditions do not refer to the real world, they are conditional within the language, ie, within the
entailment relations that prevail between the sentences. Thus: ‘Rover is a hungry dog’ is true if
‘Rover is a dog’ and ‘Rover is hungry’ are both true. The first statement entails the two. The
goal of this theory is to explain the meaning by explaining all the entailment relations between
sentences in a language.
LIMITATIONS:
The limitation of this approach is that it takes only statements into account and does not consider
other sentence types such as questions.
The truth- conditional semantics is not concerned with synthetic truth, ie, factual truth that
prevails in the real world; it is concerned about the analytic truth ie, truth by the very nature of
language, eg, entailment relation. Truth- conditional semantics explains the meaning of sentences
to a limited extent, but does so in a logical and scientific manner.
Generative theory of meaning:
Generative theory deals with the meaning as deep structure, where lexical items with particular
features are selected to combine with others to generate meaningful sentence. The study of
meaning became the subject of renewed interest with the development of the transformational –
generative model of grammar. This modal relates meaning with syntax and sound through a set
of transformations from deep structure to surface structure. Chomsky’s Standard Theory and
later Revised Extended Standard Theory is based on the notion that the deep structure of a
sentence and the meaning of words (lexical items) used in that structure represent the total
meaning of the sentence. At the level of deep structure, lexical items are inserted into syntactic
forms, with the application of ‘selection restrictions’, and concepts such as subject and object
defined. Selection restrictions are rules regarding the permissible combination of lexical items in
language. These rules prevent the generation of unmeaningful or sentences such as ‘colourless
green ideas sleep furiously’ or combinations such as ‘red hope’. Restrictions are also placed at
the level of deep structure on the choice of certain grammatical item in relation to other
grammatical items,eg, the rule must indicate whether a verb is transitive or not if it is to have a
noun phrase after it in the syntactic structure, so that the sentence ‘ The man died’ can be
generated but not the sentence ‘ The man died’ can be generated but not the sentence ‘The man
killed’ unless there is a noun phrase after ‘killed ’contain. Similarly ‘frightened’ and ‘scared’ are
verbs both of which contain the meaning of fear, and have the same selection restrictions ie, ‘The
idea frightened the girl’ and ‘The idea scared the girl’ are both acceptable, but neither ‘The girl
frightened/scared the idea,’ are acceptable.
The semantic information in some lexical items determiners their role in sentence. Verbs like
‘talk’, ‘dream’, etc. contain the information ‘+human’, so that they cannot have a subject as
‘iron’. The specific properties of each lexical item along with the knowledge of rules regarding
the selection of the item are present in the internalized dictionary or lexicon of a language which
every native speaker possesses.
Contextual theories of meaning:
Some theories have been developed which deal with meanings of words and sentences. One such
theory is called Field theory this was developed in Europe by Trier. This explains the vocabulary
or lexicon of a language as a system of interrelated networks or semantic fields. Words that are
inter-related may belong to the same semantic-field, eg, flower, bloom, blossom, bud belong to
the same field. There may be overlapping between fields eg, the field of flower and tree may
overlap in relation to such as plant, grow. This is also the basis of the idea of collocation, since
collocated items are those which habitually co-occur with certain other items, eg, flowers collate
with bloom, letters with writing. These networks and collations are built on sense relations in
language.
Other contextual theories deal with the context of use of words and sentences by the speakers of
a language. A term given by Firth (1957) is ‘context of situation’ in which meaning is related on
the one hand to the external world or situation and on the other to levels of language such as the
sounds, syntax and words. When we try to analyse the meaning of a word or sentence, the set of
features from the external world or the context of situation becomes relevant, ie, who is the
speaker, who is the hearer, what is the role of each and the relationship of the two, what situation
they are in. According to Firth, language is only meaningful in the context of situation. This idea
becomes the basis of the link between syntax and meaning-in-context which has recently been
developed in Halliday’s approach, (1978).
Grammatically is linked to appropriacy in this approach, since the meaning of the sentence is
understood according to the real world context, the participants etc.

WORD LEARNING STRATEGIES IN CHILDREN:

1. INNATE BIASES MAKE WORD LEARNING EFFICIENT:
Several innate biases can help the child to narrow down the many possible references that could
be paired with a word that they hear.
The biases that help the child map a new word to the right referent are:
 Principle of reference- this principle asserts the word refer- that is, that words refer to
objects, actions, states, and attributes in the environment. For this principle to operate,
children must attend to the environment and use information from the environment to
map onto words representing this information.
 Novel name-nameless category principle- a novel word will be taken as the name for a
previously unnamed object
 Principle of mutual exclusivity- states that if the child already has a name for an object,
it cannot receive another name.
 Whole object bias- guides the child to infer that the word label refers to the entire object
and not just a part, an attribute, or its motion.
 Principle of extendibility- states that a word does not refer to only one object, but rather
refers to a category of objects, events or actions if they share similar properties.
 Shape bias- it constrains word extension based on shared perceptual features of the
original referent and the novel exemplar. It is particularly important for vocabulary
growth.
 Therefore, children appear to adapt to and integrate multiple perceptual cues to make
inferences about what something is or is not.

2. PERCEPTUAL & SOCIAL CUES FOR WORD LEARNING:

The Emergentist coalition model describes how children coalesce environmental cues and
innate biases to learn new words. With development and experience, the child learns which cues
are more reliable indicators of word referent pairings.
Infants aged 12 to 18 months initially consider perceptual salience to be a more important cue
about what is being labeled than a social cue.
By ages 18 to 24 months, children have learned that the social cue is a more reliable indicator of
the word to referent mapping. Thus, at this age, children’s accuracy in linking words to referents
becomes more efficient. Now when they hear a word, they pay attention to the adult’s gesture
and eye gaze to ensure a reliable word to referent mapping.

3. MAPPING AS A PROCESS OF WORD LEARNING:

Carey (1978) described, word learning is a gradual and long term process. Learning a word
grossly encompasses learning the lexeme (word form or label), the semantic representation
(word meaning) and grammatical specifications (e.g. word-class information) plus making
connections between the various representations.
Carey delineated two phases of word learning: fast mapping and slow mapping.
Fast mapping: A word is considered fast mapped if there is an initial association made between
word and referent. A related phenomenon has been termed quick incidental learning. QUIL
reflects more naturally occurring word learning situations-that is, situations that offer minimal
environment support with multiple cues in ongoing scenes. In this fast mapping process, lexical
and semantic information are weakly represented in memory after such a brief exposure.
Slow mapping: it is a process of enriching lexical – semantic representations after a word is fast
mapped into memory. The child’s representations are enriched through increased frequency of
exposure/ richer quality of exposure.

4. ASSOSCIATION OF LEXICAL & SEMANTIC REPRESENTATIONS:

Lexical and semantic information are stored and linked within a distributed neural network in the
brain. For example, the concept of bone comprises visual information (shape, color), thematic
associates (dogs chew bones), actions (chewing), the proprioceptive-tactile experience of feeling
its weight and rough texture, and its lexeme /bo:n/.
Each of these is a node of information (semantic, phonological, lexical) in the network;
connections within and between representations, in turn, allow for spreading of neural activation
among semantic and lexical nodes. The richer quality and quantity of connections provide an
activation strength that will reach the activation threshold of the lexeme which will be recalled.

WORD LEARNING ERRORS IN CHILDREN:

OVEREXTENSION:
When a child uses a word too broadly to refer to referents that may be similar in perceptual
feature or function, the error is referred to as an over extension (example: calling a strange man a
daddy).
UNDEREXTENSION:
Under extended words narrow the meaning of the referent. An example, the use of the word dog
only when referring to the child’s pet, and not when referring to other dogs.
Clark (1973) has estimated that overextensions and under extensions occur frequently and can
represent as much as one third of a child’s early vocabulary between the ages of one and two
years.

Two traditional theories attempt to explain extension errors:

First, the semantic feature hypothesis (Clark, 1973) states that children classify and organize
referents in terms of perceptual features such as size, shape, texture, etc. This phenomenon
explains overextensions in which a child generalizes a word based on perceptual similarity (e.g.
ball- moon).
Second, the functional core hypothesis (Nelson, 1974) states that words are overextended
because of the actions or functions performed using objects rather than the perceptual features of
the referents. Thus a child may say the word ‘rake’ when a person is sweeping because the
actions are similar.

Influence of semantics on syntax

- A central task in learning language acquisition is differentiating how different roles in an
event are indicated. In other words, children need both to comprehend and produce the
who-does-what-to-whom of the event.
- Languages indicate the semantic case or category, such as agent (who) and the patient
(whom) and their relation, in different ways, including word order and morphological
markers.
- In general, languages differ along a continuum in which highly word-ordered languages,
such as English, have fewer morphological markers, and those with a freer word order,
such as Italian, have more markers.
- In English, children will primarily depend on word order to both comprehend and
produce sentences.
- Example, when English-speaking children as young as 2 are asked to act out an utterance
such as “The spoon kicked the horse,” they use word-order cues to interpret the sentence
even though the more likely real-world scenario is just the opposite. When presented with
the same utterance, Italian-speaking children ignore word order and make the horse kick
the spoon, because word order is quite variable in Italian. Instead the children use
semantic plausibility, which in this case is that the animate entity would do the kicking.
- Probably, the most discussion of case marking in English has centered, around pronoun
case errors, such as Me go and Her eating. About 50% of English-speaking 2- to 4-year
olds make such pronoun errors, especially substituting patient for agent (Me do it) but
rarely the reverse (Mommy spank I).
- This would follow the phonological regularity found in the first sound of the masculine
pronouns he-him-his-himself and the third-person plural they-them-their-themselves.
- In other words, errors may be based on both semantic and phonological factors, although
no one is certain.
References:

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Assessment and Intervention. United States: Elsevier
 Crystal, D. (1981). Clinical linguistics. Wien: Springer-Verlag.
 Hoff, E. (2009). Language development. Australia: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning.
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