NVESTIGATING LEXICAL ACQUISITION PATTERNS: CONTEXT AND COGNITION

Chapter 2:

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS FOR THE
ACQUISITION OF THE WORD’S MEANING

2.1 Prologue

The question of how children acquire natural language and particularly how they come
to Ieam the meanings of the words has long occupied the central focus within the sciences
of the mind. The present chapter discusses theoretical frameworks about the acquisition
of the word’s meaning. The chapter begins by describing what is involved in the
acquisition of word meaning, and continues with discussing how different theories have
approached the question of how the word meaning is represented in the mental lexicon.
The different capacities which underlie the word learning process are also discussed. The
chapter concludes with a theory of word learning from context.

2.2 What is involved in the acquisition of word meaning

Meaning is an important topic in any consideration of human communication since it is
a prerequisite for understanding each other’s speech. (Messer, 1994) suggests that the
acquisition of a word’s meaning differs from the acquisition of all the other aspects of

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