Semantic

Development:
Learning the
Meanings of Words
Nikko Dañolko
Overview
 The Relations between Words and their Referents
 Theoretical Perspectives on Semantic Development
 The Study of Early Semantic Development
 How Adult Speech Influences Children’s Semantic Development
 Later Semantic Development
 Metalinguistic Development
Semantic
Development
Learning the Meaning of Words
 The acquisition of words and their meanings
does not happen all at once.
 Children’s strategies for learning word
meanings and relating them to one another
change their internal representation of
language constantly grows and becomes
organized.
The Relation
between Words and
their Referents
 Referent is something that a word is referred
to. A word or a phrase that denotes or stands
for something.
 The word is a sign that signifies a referent, but
the referent is not the meaning of the word.
 For example, “That is a chair.” The chair is the
referent to the word, “chair” but not the
meaning of it.
 The relation between the name and the thing
is arbitrary, and it is by social convention in a
particular language that speakers agree to
call something by a particular word.
 This arbitrary relation between the referent
and the sign for it is symbolic.
 Nonverbal signs can also share this symbolic
nature:
 red light (referent) – stop (meaning)
 green light (referent) – go (meaning)
 Some words, like some onomatopoeia, and
their relations with their referents can be non-
arbitrary.
 For example, the word ‘splash’ which is an
onomatopoeia refers to the sound it makes.
Meaning, the word ‘splash’ is not random, but
rather explicitly implies that the word
resembles the sound.
 However, some onomatopoeia can be
arbitrary like the sound of the dog. “woof-
woof” in English, “aw-aw” in Filipino, “wan-
wan” or “kyan-kyan” in Japanese
 Children’s earliest words have a less-than-
arbitrary relation to their referents.
 Some of the words adults use in baby-talk are
used by adults to attempt to communicate
with babies.
 It is probably easier for children to learn a
word that is more directly related to its
referent than arbitrary or symbolic.
 Children think that one cannot change the
name of something without changing its
nature as well.
 Although meaning is a mental representation
that is not to say that meaning is a mental
picture.
 Even if one has an image for a word, it is likely
to be quite individualized.
 One person’s mental image of a dog may be a
Golden Retriever, others may see a mental
image of a chihuahua.
 Meaning cannot reside solely in the mind of
the individual, but rather shared. Mental Images
 Semantic feature view is that children learn a
set of distinguishing features for each
categorical concept.
 Prototype theory suggests that children
acquire prototypes, or very good examples of
concepts, when they acquire meaning and
only later come to recognize category
members that are distant from the prototype.
 Children assign category membership not on
the basis of essential features or on
prototypes but on probabilistic grounds. Mental Images
 Classical concepts can be unambiguously
defined
 Probabilistic concept means there is not a
single set of essential features.

Mental Images
Theoretical
Perspectives on
Semantic Development
 One of the simplest explanations of how
children acquire the meanings of their first
words is that do so through associative
learning.
 Predicts that repeated exposure to a stimulus
will result in the child associating the sound of
the word bantay with the family dog.
 Learning theory may explain the earliest and
simplest kinds if linking between words and
objects.
Learning Theory
 Children learn the meanings of words by
drawing on skills in multiple domains.
 Developmental Theories attempt to explain
how the child acquires first words, why the
scope of reference of children’s early words
may not match that of adults, and how
children’s semantic systems become more
adult-like over time.
 Children are aided by a number of lexical
principles that constrain the number of Developmental
possible word-referent mapping. Theories
 According to this principle of mutual
exclusivity, the child will be inclined to
eliminate some objects as a possible referent
for something else, because it already has a
name.
 Principle of contrast suggests that the child
will not completely eliminate a word to its
referent but will assume that the meaning of
the word does not overlap perfectly with the
meaning of the word. Developmental
Theories
 Children as young as 18-months-old can make an initial
word-referent mapping after only a few exposures to a
new word.
 Carey and Bartlett (1978) first demonstrated fast mapping
by providing 3- and 4-yearolds with exposure to unfamiliar
words in the course of classroom activities. Children were
not taught the words explicitly but were simply asked, for
example, “Bring me the chromium tray, not the blue one,
the chromium one.” The researchers found that most
children remembered something about the sound and
meaning of the target word (such as that it was a color
word) a week later. Later research showed that fast-
mapped labels are remembered by preschoolers for at
least a month (Markson & Bloom, 1997), a capacity that Fast Mapping
probably helps ensure that new words will not be forgotten
quickly if they are encountered infrequently. Although
The Study of Early
Semantic
Development
 By the time children begin to acquire an initial
vocabulary, they have already been exposed
to a great deal of language and have had a
wide range of experiences. Typically,
children’s early words tend to fulfill a social
purpose. In other words, children tend to start
using words to connect to other people
through greetings and farewells

Early Words
How Adult Speech
Influences Children’s
Development
 Mothers of young children use different
strategies when teaching their children basic
level terms than when they teach either more
general or more specific terms (Hall, 1994b).
For basic-level words, mothers use ostension;
they may point and say, “That’s a tractor.”
When asked to teach superordinates,
however, they employ a strategy of inclusion,
mentioning both basic-level terms and the
superordinate term
 Mothers’ speech has also been shown to have
an effect on the ways that children come to
understand and use vocabulary relating to
their own inner states
 Vocabulary knowledge is a language domain
that is characterized by extreme individual
variability. Variability certainly comes both
from individual and contextual factors. A child
who is skillful at remembering phonological
representations, who already knows numerous
words and concepts, and who understands Individual
the concepts of “word” and “definition will Differences in
learn new words more efficiently. Vocabulary
Development:
 Research on home language environments Home and
has identified the quantity, variety, and School Factors
contextual richness of the words heard as key
predictors of children’s vocabulary acquisition
 Research, however, also suggests that there is
considerable within-group variation and considerable
overlap in the distribution of vocabulary skills across
children from different socioeconomic levels.
 Over time, sources of vocabulary knowledge expand
from primarily the home and caregivers to include a
variety of other sources, such as classroom Individual
environments, peer interactions, and exposure to Differences in
reading and other media. You can see a discussion of
this topic by Catherine Snow, one of your authors, in Vocabulary
video 4.2. Vocabulary knowledge is a key predictor of Development:
literacy development and subsequent academic Home and
success. When students do not have enough
vocabulary to understand what they read, it is
School Factors
unrealistic to expect them to learn vocabulary from
reading, and therefore explicit instruction is required
Later Semantic
Development
 Vocabulary is crucial not only because a larger
and deeper lexical repertoire allows speakers to
express themselves with more precision, flexibility,
and effectiveness but also because of the strong
association between vocabulary and reading
comprehension.
 Vocabulary breadth – no. of words known
 Vocabulary depth – encompasses the degree of
various kinds of word knowledge: the sound and
spelling of words, morphological structure, types
of sentences in which words can occur, multiple
meanings and word associations, the situations in
which its use is appropriate, and the origin of its
form and meanings.
 Children might know that bitter means
“unpleasant taste,” but they might not know
that bitter has multiple meanings.
 With repeated exposures and multiple
contexts of use, speakers accumulate
increasing levels of knowledge about a word.
 The most reliable estimates of vocabulary
breadth are based on word families, because
researchers assume that if speakers know one
of the words in a family, they know the others.
 A word family includes a base word, its
inflections, and some regular derived forms.
 A 5-year-old native English speaker is
presumed to have a vocabulary of
approximately 4,000 to 5,000 word families.
 Some of this is enabled by the child’s growth
in the ability to perform morphological
decomposition: to untangle a new word into
its component derivational and inflectional
morphemes to gain meaning and build new
words out of old pieces of knowledge.
Semantic development is also reflected in the
incrementality of various kinds of knowledge
about already acquired words.
Not only do children learn new words and new
concepts, they also enrich and solidify their
knowledge of known words by establishing
multiple links among words and concepts.
Developmental change in children’s word
associations indicate that the words in
children’s vocabularies are become increasingly
interconnected.
Metalinguistic
Development
 The primary focus of this chapter is on children’s
development of semantic knowledge, in which
words symbolize, or stand for, particular
meanings. Once we know the meanings of words,
we do not need to notice the words themselves
in order to appreciate the information they carry.
 Children begin to notice words as objects and
later become able to manipulate them to learn to
read and write and to accomplish a host of
nonliteral ends such as using metaphors,
creating puns, and using irony.
 Metalinguistic awareness develops gradually
through the middle school years.
 Children’s ability to compare and contrast such
properties explicitly, in a formal way, develops only
gradually over a period of several years, but even
very young children on occasion are able to
appreciate and reflect upon the physical attributes
of words
 Both phonological awareness (discussed in Chapter
3) and meta-linguistic awareness are now known to
play a critical role in predicting children’s reading
and literacy skills. By the time children enter
school, the process of learning language has
enlarged to include using language to learn; by that
Word-Concept
point, phonological, morphological, and Awareness
metalinguistic awareness facilitate, and also profit
from, children’s reading experiences
 Many humorous uses of language, such as
puns and riddles, depend on the speaker’s
ability to separate different facets of
language, such as phonetic form and
meaning
 Parents begin to expose very young children
to the humorous uses of language setting the Word-Meaning
stage for a long process during which children Awareness:
gradually master the ability not only to laugh humor,
when it appears that a joke has been made Metaphor, and
but to explain why it is that the utterance is Irony
funny
 it be based on the sound properties of words
(sometimes called puns), the fact that
individual words have multiple meanings
(lexical ambiguity), or other features of the
joke. Delight in puns and riddles, like interest
in favorite words, becomes particularly
intense in the middle elementary school
years. By age 9, most children not only Word-Meaning
understand the humor in riddles, they can Awareness:
explain its source. humor,
Metaphor, and
Irony
 Defining a word involves metalinguistic skills
in that it requires using language to explain
language (Benelli, Belacchi, Gini, & Lucangeli,
2006). These various metalinguistic skills are
called upon because constructing an adult-
like definition is a twofold process: First, the
speaker needs to have adequate semantic
knowledge about the meaning of the word to
be defined; second, the speaker needs to be
familiar with the formal structure of
definitions, that is, the definitional genre.
Word Definitions
 That is all!

Thank you!
Dañolko