NVESTIGATING LEXICAL ACQUISITION PATTERNS: CONTEXT AND COGNITION

Brown (1957) suggested that children might use the part-of-speech membership of a new
word as a first cue to its meaning. To test this, he showed preschoolers a picture of a
strange action done to a novel substance with a novel object. One group of children was
told: “Do you know what it means to sib? In this picture you can see sibbing” (verb
syntax); another group was told: “Do you know what a sib is ? In this picture you can see
a sib” (count noun syntax); and the third group was told: “Have you seen any sib? In this
picture you can see sib” (mass noun syntax). Then the children were shown three pictures,
one that depicted the identical substance. They were asked to “show me another picture
of sibbing” (or another picture of a sib, or another picture of sib). Brown (1957) found that
the children were sensitive to the syntax when inferring the meaning of the new word; they
tended to construe the verb as referring to the action, the count noun as referring to the
object, and the mass noun as referring to the substance.

Brown’s (1957) initial work on the count-mass contrast has been extended to younger
children. Two - and three- year-olds will tend to construe a novel count noun as referring
to a kind of individual (such as a bounded physical object) and a novel mass noun as
referring to a kind of non-individuated entity (Bloom, 1994; Landau, Jones & Smith,
1988; Soja, 1992). More recently, children’s sensitivity to syntax-semantic mappings has
been explored in the area of verb learning (Gleitman, 1990) and extended to domains such
as the acquisition of adjectives and prepositions (Bloom, 1996).

Given the complexity of word meaning acquisition, it seems likely that children use
whatever information will help to narrow the available possibilities. The information
provided by syntactic bootstrapping is important because it provide hints about the
possible denotation of words, hints that may be especially important for words that lack
concrete referents.

2.3.1.2 Semantic bootstrapping hypothesis

Semantic bootstrapping refers to the use of external contextual information about the
semantic roles of entities that affect or are influenced by events to infer word meaning.
For both oral and written language it is the context which gives words their meaning. In
other words, words do not have fixed meanings, but rather take on different senses in
different contexts.

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