NVESTIGATING LEXICAL ACQUISITION PATTERNS: CONTEXT AND COGNITION

assume that the word refers to the existing concept of that object, and the word would
take on that meaning. Although, sometimes there are cases where the child’s and the
adult’s meaning would not correspond, with experience, children’s meanings would
undergo modification.

Nelson’s theory was criticised for not being able to deal with the way children break into
the circular processes of needing to have a concept to identify relevant attributes, and
needing to identify relevant attributes to form a concept (on the same grounds, Nelson
criticised the semantic feature theory). Children in that case have to categorise objects
according to their functional similarity, and they still have to identify what are the similar
features of different examples of the same function. In Bowerman’s (1978) example,
“chairs” might be identified by the act of sitting, but there are many ways of positioning
oneself on chairs: kneeling, lying, etc.

Another criticism is dealing with the fact that overextension usually occurs on the basis
of perceptual rather than functional characteristics (Bowerman, 1978). Children will often
overextend a word on the basis of perceptual characteristics such as shape, for example,
calling all round objects “ball”. Bowerman (1978) found that overextension sometimes
occurs with little or no regard to the functional relationships between the objects.
Additionally, although Nelson predicted that names would first be used in a functional
context, Bowerman found that words were sometimes first said when an object was not
involved in a functional relationship with the child.

2.3 Different capacities underlie the word learning process

To give some idea of what a formidable task children face in acquiring a lexicon, consider
the fact that adult English speakers’ production vocabulary is between 20,000 and 50,000
word forms, while comprehension vocabulary is considerably larger. In the case of young
children, some estimates suggest that from the age of two onwards, children on average
master around 10 new words a day to arrive at a vocabulary of about 14,000 words by age
of six. Growth in vocabulary from then on to about age seventeen averages at least 3,000
new words a year. The number of words and meanings that children acquire is
phenomenal.

36

<<   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   >>

More intriguing information