NVESTIGATING LEXICAL ACQUISITION PATTERNS: CONTEXT AND COGNITION

Suppose the child observes a bear hitting a tiger in a distinctive way while the speaker
says “the bear is kaboozling”; as noted above, the syntactic context would suggest an
intransitive verb; however the salient activity would be an action whereby the bear
influenced the tiger, and so could lead the child to infer that “Kaboozle” was a transitive
verb. Had the same sentence been uttered in the context of a bear Simplyjumping around
in an odd fashion, this would have supported the notion that “kaboozle” was an
intransitive verb, and it would probably be interpreted as referring to that action (Bishop,
1998). Experimental support for the semantic bootstrapping comes from Au’s (1990)
study, who found that pre-school children can use information in the input very efficiently
in learning a new word.

Semantic bootstrapping could be also related to the paradigmatic relations proposed by
Kuczaj (Kuczaj, in press). Paradigmatic relations as defined by Kuczaj include lexical
opposites, hyponymy and semantic sets. These sorts of relations provide one type of
structure for the lexicon. Consequently, the manner in which children Ieam such relations
has important implications for the development of the lexicon (Kuczaj, 1975, 1982;
Carey, 1985; Clark, 1993).

Just as children may experience difficulty in determining the correct denotation of a word,
they may have trouble ascertaining which semantic relation is the relevant one for words
they are trying to relate. As children expand their lexicon, they Ieam more and more
semantic domains. As a result, children are continually refining the nature and structure
of their semantic sets and fields (Kuczaj, 1975; Dromi & Fishelzon, 1986; Dromi, 1987;
Clark, 1993).

Children must discover a number of paradigmatic relations in order to correctly structure
their lexicon. For example, children must Ieam that objects can be referred to by more than
one word (Golinkoff and Bertrand, 1994).The children must also determine how the
words relate to one another, and discover how they can be used to create metaphor (i.e.
that boy is a dog (Winner, 1988). As the child discovers these sorts of relations, it is likely
that word meaning development is launched. The child becomes better able to organize
the lexicon (Kuczaj, 1982) and may also become aware of gaps in the lexicon (Clark,
1993).

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