NVESTIGATING LEXICAL ACQUISITION PATTERNS: CONTEXT AND COGNITION

emerge in full bloom, but is instead initially highly contextually dependent. In this view,
children never equate words and objects, because they know from the beginning that
words are used to label things.

Denotation

When children first produce words that they hear, they must determine the denotation of
each word that they leam. How do children decide exactly what particular words denote?
Certainly, children must depend on contextual information to interpret words. According
to Kuczaj (1975, 1982) the manner in which a child interprets a word depends on the
child’s existing lexicon, knowledge of the world, and cognitive skills.

The child’s interpretation and memory of the situation in which the word was first
encountered will determine the child’s initial guess about the word’s denotation. This
requires the child to be an exceptional information processor. Не/she must interpret,
organize, store and retrieve vast amounts of information about words.

Regardless of whether or not a new word has a concrete referent, children may make a
quick guess about a word’s denotation, often on the basis of limited experience, a
phenomenon which is called “fast mapping” (Carey, 1978; Dockrell and Campbell, 1986;
Heibeck and Markman, 1987). For example, if a child is first exposed to the word beige
in the context of instruction “bring me the beige one, not the blue one”, the child might
conclude that beige is a colour term and that it is a colour other than blue (Carey and
Bartlett, 1978).

Sense

Frege’s (1892) classic example, which is frequently used in discussions of sense and
reference, is the following: “The Morning Star is the Evening Star”. As Frege pointed
out, the two expressions “The Morning Star” and “the Evening Star” have the same
references (Bedeutung), since they each refer to the same planet. But they can not be said
to have the same sense. If they did they would be tautologous for example “The Morning
Star is the Moming Star”.

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