found that mothers’ uses of superordinate terms for 2 and ½ year-old children were
significantly correlated with children’s understanding of such items one year later.
Together, these accumulating evidence provide important support for the proposal that
word learning and lexical development in general are functions not only of a child’s
developing capacities and dispositions but of the contextually and developmentally
dependent guidance provided by parents and others.
What, then, supports lexical development? To recapitulate, first the child’s own
developing capacity for, and interest in, categorizing objects and events in the world.
Second, learning is supported by adults who label those objects and events in different
contexts and at different developmental points and the kind of information they supply to
the child about them. Finally, the semantic-conceptual system itself determines the course
of development. At first, the child does not even know how words can be used, thus
acquisition of words is restricted to certain contexts. Later, when words are mapped to the
conceptual system, they are limited to denotational aspects derived from the child’s
experience. Finally, the lexicon may expand indefinitely as words are related to other
words and knowledge is gained through language as well as through direct experience.
However, a constraint theorist might argue that regardless of how some mothers might aid
children in the process of word learning, children are still faced with a logical infinity of
candidate hypothesis. Psychologists have to develop a theory of the sorts of mental
mechanisms that allow children to infer the correct hypothesis from the linguistic and non
linguistic context that they are exposed to or they have to use the theory of constraints.
Nonetheless, the existence of such approaches suggests that there may be worthwhile
alternatives to the straightforward “hypothesis testing” theory of the acquisition and
representation of word meaning. Probably an integration approach between constraints-or
preferably strategies- and complex interactive functional model would offer a better
option to the lexical acquisition problem. The environmental conditions where the
children can learn any words needs to be explained in more depth.
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