Lexical Development Flashcards
Arbitrariness
Sound of a word has no systematic relationship to the meaning of a word
>exception is onomatopoeia (“meow”)
Context-bound words
-Used in only some contexts
>E.g. using word “car” ONLY for cars outside the window.
Prelexical words
Not truly referential
Nominals
Names for objects, nouns.
Decontextualization
Words used more flexibly and referentially.
Natural partitions hypothesis
Difference between nouns and verbs based on pre-existing perceptual-conceptual distinction between Concrete Concepts (persons, things) and Predicative Concepts (activity, change-of-state, casual relations
Relational relativity hypothesis
- Meanings of nouns are more similar than the meanings of verbs across languages
- Language-specific differences may make verbs harder to learn.
Underextensions
Children use a word in fewer contexts than should
> using “dog” to refer only to poodles.
Overextensions
Children use a word in more contexts than they should/
> Using “dog” to refer to all four-legged mammals.
Holistic
everything as a unit rather than a sum of its individual parts.
Referential style
- More social expressions
- Fewer referential nouns
Expressive syle
- More social expressions
- Fewer referential nouns
Segmentation
[clear] beginnings and endings
Fast mapping
Initial mapping on the basis of only a few exposures
> Children show a familiar and an unfamiliar object. “Can I have the zib”
Whole-object assumption
When confronted with a new word for an object children assume word describes whole object, not a feature or a sub-part.
Mutual Exclusivity Assumption
Not all words refer to whole objects.
Children assume that different words refer to different things
Pragmatic principles
Child infers intent of speaker
Principle of conventionality
Speakers of a common language use same words to express meaning
> e.g., when referring to someplace to sit at the dining table, we use the word “chair”
Principle of contrast
Implication of principle of conventionality, so they use a different form to imply that the speaker is referring to DIFFERENT MEANING “dog” vs “pet”
Syntactic bootstrapping
Using syntactic cues to aid learning words
Extension
Extending word meanings to new examples.
> “This is a cup – what else is a cup?”
Taxonomic assumption
Words refer to things of same kind.
> If learn word for a given “dog,” assume it applies to all things of the same kind, i.e., all “dogs”
