Different possible explanations may account for how children extract individual words
from the speech stream. It may be that the child is born with that ability (Chomsky and
Hale, 1968). However, this is not an explanation unless someone can specify exactly what
is innate. Another possibility could be that children are driven to develop the ability to
hear words as units by some innate factor (Chomsky, 1969). Nevertheless, in order for this
possibility to be an explanation, the nature of the constraint must be specified. Another
feasible solution could be that the environment leads children to distinguish one word
from another (Kuczaj, 1990). All the above types of answer (innate ability, innate
constraints and environmental influence) hold not only for explaining the ability to
perceive words as separate units, but also as explanations of word meaning acquisition.
2.2.2 Identification of what is in a word’s meaning
According to Carey (1978) children must Ieam at least four things in order to acquire the
meaning of a word, which are the following: (1) the pronunciation of the word, (2) the
syntactic properties of the word, (3) the meaning of the word and (4) how the word is
used to communicate one’s intended message. All this information is stored in the
lexicon.
In order for the child to complete the acquisition process, the relevant information about
words (pronunciation, syntax, meaning, communication of the message) must be
represented in the mind. The mental lexicon consists of these representations. There have
been several attempts to determine the nature of the representation, by scientists from
different fields, such as, philosophers, linguists and psychologists. An interesting attempt
was offered by Lyons (1977) who proposed a distinction between reference, denotation
and sense, as an attempt to characterize meaning.
Reference of a word is the thing or the things picked out by the word on a particular
occasion of use. For example, the word dog in the sentence “The black one looks mean”,
in a situation in which there are several dogs, one of which is black (Anderson et al. 1991).
Denotation indicates the entire class of entities associated with a word. Denotative
meaning is the type of meaning involved when words are used to refer to something, such
as an object, some property of an object, some action, or a hypothetical idea. For example,
27
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