Clark & Grossman (1998) claim that children readily adopt alternate conceptual
perspectives on the same entity. They both accept and make use of multiple terms for
referring to the same entities, and they do so from as early as 18 months. The emergence
of perspective-taking marked by lexical choices appears to coincide with the emergence
of spatial perspective-taking and with the onset of pretend play, both of which presuppose
the ability to take alternate perspectives on the same entity.
Regarding alternate perspectives, children need to understand how terms are related. For
example, nothing in the forms of the words animal and cat would allow the inference that
a cat could be referred to as either the cat or the animal. But if children are offered
pragmatic directions like “ A cat is a kind of animal” or “That cat is Jan’s pet”, they
readily adopt the alternate perspectives required. If such directions are absent, they may
ignore a new term or refuse to use it. They lack the information needed to infer that it too
refers to the target object type. In word learning tasks, it is the presence or absence of the
relevant pragmatic directions that accounts for whether children will or will not accept
more than one term for a particular object.
Taken together the importance of Nelson’s (1990) interactive functional model and the
importance of pragmatic directions as proposed by Clark (1998) a theory of word learning
from context proposed by Stemberg and Powell (1983) is discussed in the next section.
2.4 Towards a theory of word learning from context
Sternberg and Powell (1983) have developed a theory of word learning from context.
They argue that learning from context provides a way of integrating two aspects of verbal
ability (vocabulary and comprehension). The theory distinguishes between those aspects
of vocabulary acquisition that lie strictly outside of the individual, that is, contextual cues
present in the verbal context itself that convey various types of information about the
word, and those aspects of vocabulary acquisition that lie at least partially within the
individual, that is, mediating variables that affect the perceived usefulness of the
contextual cues.
The contextual cues determine the quality of a definition that can theoretically be inferred
for a word from a given context. The mediating variables specify those constraints
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