How, though, do children go about this task ? Quine’s argument is that there is always
more than one hypothesis for the meaning of a new term which is consistent with the
present evidence. A well-known example being proposed by Quine is to imagine that a
linguist visits an unknown country and attempts to Ieam the native language. When a
rabbit passes a native says,"Gavagai". How is the linguist to figure out what "Gavagai"
means? There are many hypotheses for "Gavagai" to refer to "white" or "furry" or
"medium-sized" or "rabbit" or "rabbit next to the tree" or "the rabbit and its carrot"
(Markman, 1989). To identify possible words of their language, they must isolate word
forms. They must also identify candidate meanings. And they must link the two together
in setting up lexical entries in their mental lexicon.
Young children beginning to acquire the lexicon face the same problem as Quine's.
Despite these complexities, children of two years and over, acquire a very large
vocabulary very fast. In recent years, to investigate how children acquire new words,
researchers have used methodologies employing the introduction of novel words. The
term novel in most instances implies either nonsense words created by the examiner, or
real but unfamiliar words. When encountering a novel word children have been shown to
use a strategy called “fast mapping” to help them infer the meaning of the word.
Fast mapping is the term coined by Carey and Bartlett (1978) to refer to the rapid
acquisition of information about a word during the first few encounters with it. In one
study, when three-year-olds heard an unfamiliar word form chromium, alongside other
words for colour, they assumed that it picked out a colour. They did this on the basis of
hearing the new word only once or twice (Carey, 1978, Carey and Bartlett, 1978).
Children’s willingness to assign some meaning to a new word-form after hearing it only
once or twice allows them to set up a large number of lexical entries (albeit incomplete
ones) in a relatively short time. Once they have some entry in memory, children can
continue to add or adjust information that seems pertinent, over a lifetime if need be.
During mapping the children must isolate the word forms of their language; they must
create potential meanings; and then they have to map the meanings onto the forms.
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