(b) parents, siblings, and other adults interacting with the child linguistically and
nonlinguistically in a variety of contexts, including play and caretaking, focusing on the
child or on other people ,s activities',
(c ) within these varied contexts, words being used that have conventional meanings in
the parent language, children being introduced to them in situations where their use is
appropriate and their reference often thereby transparent.
The conditions of lexical acquisition sketched out above not only differ from the
constraints’ theorists approach, but contrast markedly with the choice and sorting tasks
typically employed in this research. In these experiments there is no real-world interactive
context, no adult collaborator to support inferences and provide feedback. The child is
forced to rely on his or her own strategies of interpretation. What the child interprets are
the experimenter’s implicit demands as reflected in the task and instructions and, as has
been demonstrated, different conditions lead to different interpretations. The relevance
of evidence coming from experiments drawing on theories such as the constraints
approach to word learning under natural conditions are seriously in doubt.
Nelson (1988) contrasted the notion of “constraint” with that of “bias”. For Nelson a
constraint implies some sort of restriction that should result in uniform development
patterns. In contrast, a bias implies some sort of preference rather than an absolute
predisposition. Nelson’s own position is that constraints on word meaning do not exist.
She rejects the sort of hypothesis formation and testing model, arguing that “children, like
adults, do not seek certainty of reference, but only communicability”. She adopts a
Wittgensteinian (1953) alternative that conceptualizes understanding of language as the
capacity to participate in a language game. As such the development of language is better
viewed as a social convergence process, where the adult and child work together to attain
communicative success (Adams & Bullock, 1986; Nelson, 1985, Vygotsky, 1962).
That model is based on what she calls “experientialism” (1996). According to Nelson
experientialism is not equivalent to the traditional empiricist assumption that all
knowledge is built up from sensation. Experience based knowledge derives from varying
sources: from action in the world, from perception, from biological dispositions to
organise patterns of experience in specific ways, from social interactions and activities,
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