and from cultural arrangements. Experientialism assumes that dynamic processes are in
continual interaction with the experienced world, yielding ever-changing models of
reality.
The continuing problem for the child is to acquire word forms and match them to the
contexts of word uses of the adult. Even when the child uses a form in the same contexts
that the adult does, it may be that the two do not have the same meanings, as Vygotsky
(1962) stressed. The child is guided toward the conventional uses by the adult, both
directly and indirectly. But the child must also rely on his or her own cognitive processes
to construct meanings from the language in use. According to Adams and Bullock, (1986)
there are two necessary conditions to the establishment of a working lexicon: (a) cognitive
processes, including especially the establishment of conceptual representations and the
formation of relations among concepts of varying kinds; and (b) the guidance direct and
indirect, of the adult partner toward convergence on conventional meanings, including
both denotation and sense (Dockrell & Campbell 1986; Lyons, 1977; Nelson, 1985).
Nelson supports her perspective by citing several studies suggesting that mothers tailor
their naming practices to the age and capacities of the child (Mervis, 1984). Several
studies have also provided evidence that constructing a semantic system is a collaborative
project. For example, a number of studies have traced the effects of maternal naming
practices on children’s lexical development. Ninio and Bruner (1978) examined the
evolution of mothers’ picture-book reading practices as children’s competence at naming
increased over the course of several months. Mervis’s (1984) work showed that mothers
adapt their use of object labels for their 1-year old children to what they believe the child’s
category to be, but also provide distinctive information as the child grows older to enable
the child to find the conceptual basis for the conventional adult label for an object.
Barrett et. al. (1986) reported that during the very earliest period when children tend to
restrict their word uses to a single object or situation, their mothers were found to be
restricting their own uses in a similar way, suggesting that the child’s uses were scaffolded
by the adult model or vice verca. Lucariello and Nelson (1986) found that maternal
naming practices varied by context and provided clues within those contexts that the child
could use for constructing hierarchical categories from event knowledge. Watson (1987)
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