Word Learning

Abstract

Children show the first signs of word recognition as young as 6 months and produce their first words at around a year. Word learning then proceeds rapidly, despite the complexity of determining what a word refers to and the challenge of learning and using words in new contexts. How children solve this puzzle is the focus of some debate, and several mechanisms have been proposed, including innate strategies, simple associative learning, and sociopragmatic cues. Whichever account best explains early vocabulary development (and the story is unlikely to be that simple), word learning is affected by many varied factors, including the language environment and characteristics intrinsic to the child, as well as nonlinguistic, often visual information. Novel paradigms offer new ways of understanding this fundamental component of early language acquisition and emphasize that inputs to word learning are critically mediated by the interaction between the child's body and the learning environment.

The differentiation of early word meanings from global to specific categories: Towards a verification of the “semantic pluripotency hypothesis”

“…In languages such as English, most words are primarily divided into two classes, namely nouns and verbs, based on their grammatical and logical properties (Whorf, 1940(Whorf, /1956. Thus, in research on early language development, noun learning has traditionally been contrasted with verb learning (Gentner, 1982;Gentner & Boroditsky, 2001;Gleitman & Gleitman, 1992;Gogate & Hollich, 2016;Goldin-Meadow et al, 1976;McDonough, Song, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Lannon, 2011;Twomey & Hilton, 2020;Waxman et al, 2013). Since nouns learned early generally correspond to object categories, such as "cup," and verbs learned early typically correspond to action categories, such as "eat," (Gogate & Hollich, 2016) researchers tried to theoretically and empirically explain why word-object connections are more advantageous to learn than word-action connections 3 .…”

“…To overcome this referential indeterminacy problem and exhaustively explain children's early word learning, several different mechanisms have been proposed, although they remain controversial (Twomey & Hilton, 2020). Roughly speaking, some researchers suggest that children have innate mechanisms for language acquisition (e.g., Markman, 1989), while others argue that word learning can be explained by a simple associative learning theory (e.g., Samuelson & Smith, 1998), and others claim that socio-pragmatic factors play a crucial role in word learning (e.g., Tomasello, 2003).…”

“…physical and social environments (Pereira, Smith, & Yu, 2014;Suanda, Barnhart, Smith, & Yu, 2019;West & Iverson, 2017;Yamamoto, 2020;Yoshida & Smith, 2008Yu & Smith, 2012; and the socio-pragmatic approach explains children's sensitivity to social cues as innate traits unique to humans (Csibra & Gergely, 2011;Tomasello & Rakoczy, 2003). What is clear, at least for now, is that various types of cues affect children's word learning (Christiansen & Monaghan, 2006;Frank, Tenenbaum, & Fernald, 2013;Hollich et al, 2000;Twomey & Hilton, 2020;Waxman & Gelman, 2009;Wildt, Rohlfing, & Scharlau, 2019;Yu & Ballard, 2007). However, the cues that are the most important for early word learning vary across theories.…”

“…Conversely, for some verb-friendly languages such as Mandarin, verbs are relatively equivalent to nouns (or even dominant) in early vocabulary (Brown, 1998;Choi & Gopnik, 1995;Tardif, 1996;Tardif et al, 2008;Tardif, Gelman, & Xu, 1999). Research on the developmental order in which nouns and verbs are learned has been conducted over many decades, and has elucidated the language-general and languagespecific features of early word learning (e.g., Gentner, 1982;Gentner & Boroditsky, 2001;Gleitman & Gleitman, 1992;Gogate & Hollich, 2016;Goldin-Meadow, Seligman, & Gelman, 1976;McDonough, Song, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Lannon, 2011;Twomey & Hilton, 2020;Waxman et al, 2013). Further, especially in English, most words are mainly divided into two classes based on their grammatical and logical properties: nouns and verbs (Whorf, 1940(Whorf, /1956).…”

“…When categorizing children's early vocabulary into parts of speech, nouns hold the dominant position in many languages, compared to verbs (Bornstein et al, 2004;Caselli, Casadio, & Bates, 1999;Fenson et al, 1994;Frank, Braginsky, Yurovsky, & Marchman, in press;Gentner & Boroditsky, 2001), except for some verb-friendly languages (Brown, 1998;Choi & Gopnik, 1995;Tardif, 1996;Tardif et al, 2008;Tardif, Gelman, & Xu, 1999). Traditionally, noun learning has been contrasted with verb learning to elucidate the universal characteristics of early language development (Gentner, 1982;Gentner & Boroditsky, 2001;Gleitman & Gleitman, 1992;Gogate & Hollich, 2016;Goldin-Meadow, Seligman, & Gelman, 1976;McDonough, Song, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Lannon, 2011;Twomey & Hilton, 2020;Waxman et al, 2013). Since early nouns semantically correspond to object categories (e.g., "shoe") and early verbs correspond to action categories (e.g., "put on") (Gogate & Hollich, 2016), researchers have been motivated to explain, both theoretically and empirically, why such "object words" are advantageous for learning over action words.…”