NVESTIGATING LEXICAL ACQUISITION PATTERNS: CONTEXT AND COGNITION

2.3.1.3 Criticism of the linguistic capacities explanation

The process of selecting the correct referent using syntactic and semantic bootstrapping
is facilitated in normally-developing children by their strong tendency to monitor the
direction of gaze of other people, and hence to locate the focus of attention (Baron-Cohen,
Baldwin & Crowson, 1993). This is a very effective strategy for learning some concrete
nouns, but it is hard to see how other words, such as verbs, could be mastered this way
(Fisher, Hall, Rakowitz & Gleitman, 1994).

2.3.2 Conceptual capacities

In the earlier discussion of the ability to differentiate words in the speech stream, three
types of possible explanations were given. One possible explanation relied on the notion
of constraints. The basic idea is that during the course of evolution, innately specified
ways of interpreting and organizing information have come to determine the manner in
which children acquire language. This type of explanation has become more popular in
recent accounts of word meaning development. In this section, the theoretical
underpinnings of the notion of constraints and the evidence for and against constraints of
word meaning acquisition are discussed.

The task that children face in the construction of a lexicon is an arduous one. They must
deal with an abundance of information, and somehow sort out individual words, their
pronunciations, meanings, permissible combinations and communicative systems. Given
the complexity of the task faced by children and the many possible interpretations when
one is exposed to a new word, it has been suggested that children manage to acquire words
and meanings as quickly as they do because their choices are constrained (Markman and
Hutchinson, 1984).

There appears to be a rich array of such constraints regarding the acquisition of word
meaning. Clark (1993) has suggested that those might ease the burden of the young
child. Some of the constraints that have been identified and are discussed in the next
section are the whole object constraint; the taxonomic constraint; the mutual exclusivity
constraint; the principle of contrast; the contrast and conventionality; the basic level
constraint (Mervis, 1987; Markman and Hutchinson, 1984; Markman 1991).

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