Eve V. Clark

WHAT'S IN A WORD? ON THE CHILD'S ACQUISITION OF SEMANTICS IN HIS FIRST LANGUAGE

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on of the knowledge that one has to have about a word to use it appropriately. From the developmental point of view, what the child knows about the meaning of a word needs to be found in addition to the way in which this knowledge changes during the language acquisition process. The semantic feature hypothesis assumed that the meanings of words are made up of features or components of meaning and proposed that children learn word meanings gradually by adding more features to their lexical entries. The general predictions made by this theory have been shown to be remarkably consistent with data from several different sources in the literature on childrens language. The theory contains a number of lacunae that future work will have to fill. For example, there is no account of the internal structure or lack of it in the childs earliest lexical entries. To study language acquisition properly, semantics cannot be ignored, for it is essential to know what the children means by what they says, and to know how they understand what they hear.

On the Acquisition of the Meaning of "Before" and "After.".

It was proposed that children acquire the meanings of words component by component. Forty children between 3;0 and 5;0 were asked to act out instructions containing the temporal conjunctions before and after (e.g., Before the boy jumped the gate, he patted the dog ) and to answer questions demanding before and after in their replies. The results showed four stages in acquisition: first, children understood neither word; second, children understood before but not after ; third, children interpreted after as if it meant before ; and fourth, children understood both words correctly. Linguistically, the results indicated that children acquire the separate meaning-components of before and after hierarchically, from the super-ordinate component on down.

Non-linguistic strategies and the acquisition of word meanings

Abstract The present study proposes that childrens apparent comprehension of certain words is at first dependent on a combination of their linguistic hypotheses about a words meaning and certain non-linguistic strategies. Children aged 1;6-5;0 were given instructions requiring comprehension of the locative terms in , on and under . The results showed that children go through three stages: At first, they consistently use certain non-linguistic strategies that can be characterized by two ordered rules; next, they apply these rules to only one or two of the locative instructions; and finally, they exhibit full semantic knowledge of the three word meanings. Because of these non-linguistic strategies, the younger children always appear to understand in correctly, sometimes appear to understand on and never understand under . It is argued, nevertheless, that these non-linguistic strategies determine the order of acquisition of the three locative terms.

Adult Reformulations of Child Errors as Negative Evidence.

Parents frequently check up on what their children mean. They often do this by reformulating with a side sequence or an embedded correction what they think their children said. These reformulations effectively provide children with the conventional form for that meaning. Since the childs utterance and the adult reformulation differ while the intended meanings are the same, children infer that adults are offering a correction. In this way, reformulations identify the locus of any error, and hence the error itself. Analyses of longitudinal data from five children between 2;0 and 4;0 (three acquiring English and two acquiring French) show that (a) adults reformulate their childrens erroneous utterances and do so significantly more often than they replay or repeat error-free utterances; (b) their rates of reformulation are similar across error-types (phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic) in both languages; (c) they reformulate significantly more often to younger children, who make more errors. Evidence that children attend to reformulations comes from four measures: (a) their explicit repeats of corrected elements in their next turn; (b) their acknowledgements (yeah or uh-huh) as a preface to their next turn; (c) repeats of any new information included in the reformulation; and (d) their explicit rejections of reformulations where the adult has misunderstood. Adult reformulations, then, offer children an important source of information about how to correct errors in the course of acquisition.

On the Pragmatics of Contrast.

In this paper, I review properties and consequences of the PRINCIPLE OF CONTRAST. This principle, which I have argued from the beginning has a pragmatic basis, captures facts about the inferences speakers and addresses make for both conventional and novel words. Along with a PRINCIPLE OF CONVENTIONALITY, it accounts for the pre-emption of novel words by well-established ones. And it holds just as much for morphology as it does for words and larger expressions. In short, Contrast has the major properties Gathercole (1989) proposed as characteristic of her alternative to Contrast.

Conceptual Perspective and Lexical Choice in Acquisition.

Adult speakers choose among perspectives when they talk, with different words picking out different perspectives (e.g., the dog, our pet, that animal). The many-perspectives account of lexical acquisition proposes that children learn to take alternative perspectives along with the words they acquire, and, therefore, from the first, readily apply multiple terms to the same objects or events. And adults offer children pragmatic directions about the meanings of new words and hence about new perspectives. In contrast, the one-perspective account proposes that children are able, at first, to use only one term to talk about an object or event. Evidence for the many-perspectives account comes from a range of sources: children spontaneously use more than one term for the same object (horse and chair for a toy horse); they construct novel words to mark alternate perspectives (Dalmation-dog vs. dog); they shift perspective when asked (from cat to animal, or sailor to bear for anthropomorphic characters); and they readily learn new terms for talking about already-labelled kinds. Children sometimes fail to learn new words or fail to relate them to words already known, but only in situations that lack adequate pragmatic directions.

Awareness of Language: Some Evidence from what Children Say and Do

Children begin to reflect on certain properties of language at an early age. They comment on their own growing linguistic abilities--for example, When I was a little girl I could go ‘geek-geek’ like that. But now I can go ‘This is a chair’,“ from a child aged 2;10 (Limber, 1973). They reject wrong pronunciations--for example, when a child teased his younger brother by mimicking his pronunciation of merry-go-round, “mewwy-go-wound,” the younger brother firmly corrected him, “No, you don’t say it wight” (Maccoby & Bee, 1965). And they comment on how others, usually younger children, speak--for example, a five-year old, hearing his brother pronounce spoon, asked their mother, “Why does he say coom?” (Weir, 1966, p. 164).

On the Logic of Contrast.

The Principle of Contrast, that different words have different meanings, holds for adult language use. But at what age do children assume Contrast ? Do they rely on it from the start, or do they assume that new words may have the same meaning (the Null Hypothesis) until they discover otherwise ? Both the Null Hypothesis and Contrast have certain consequences. The Null Hypothesis places a heavy burden on languagelearners, whereas children could discover Contrast as part of their experience of rational behaviour. Examples that have been claimed to go counter to Contrast fall into two groups. Those in the first do not in fact violate Contrast at all. Those in the second rely on sameness of extension instead of sameness of meaning, and so are indeterminate as counter evidence. Usage consistent with Contrast, on the other hand, is pervasive in childrens speech from an early age.

Semantic distinctions and memory for complex sentences

This investigation studied what people remember in recalling complex sentences, whether it is certain semantic distinctions or merely transformational markers. After short intervals 24 subjects tried to recall sentences of six kinds which formed paraphrase sets: S1 before S2, S1 and then S2, After S1 S2, S2 after S1, S2 but first S1, and Before S2 S1. (S1 and S2 denote first and second clauses in temporal, not linguistic, order.) Subjects remembered the underlying sense of sentences with S1–S2 clause ordering better than those with S2–S1 clause ordering, regardless of transformational complexity. Subjects also showed a response bias, hence better verbatim recall, for sentences with subordinate clause second and for sentences with S1–S2 clause ordering. Sentence confusions indicated that subjects remembered three semantic distinctions: the temporal order, order of mention, and main-subordinate relation of the two described events. A theory of memory for marked and unmarked semantic distinctions was used to account for the results.

On the child's acquisition of antonyms in two semantic fields

It was hypothesized that children set up semantic fields automatically as they learn something of the meaning of related words. Thirty children between 4;0 and 5;5 played a word game in which they had to respond to the experimenters word with its opposite. The pairs used were dimensional and spatio-temporal terms. The results showed (a) a distinct order of acquisition among the pairs based on their relative complexity of meaning, and (b) substitutions, as opposites, of semantically simpler, better-known words for lesser-known words. Both results were compatible with the hypothesis, and they also ruled out some other possible explanations.