Lexical Development
lexical constraints
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principle of contrast
A pragmatic principle that, by hypothesis, leads children to assume that different words have different meanings.
principle of conventionality
A pragmatic principle that, by hypothesis, leads children to assume that words are used by all speakers to express the same meaning-that is, that word meaning is a convention.
pragmatic principles
A principle about how word are used that, by hypothesis, helps children figure out the meaning of newly encountered words.
word
A sound sequence that symbolizes meaning and can stand alone
referential language style
A style of vocabulary development in which a child's early lexicon is heavily dominated by object labels.
expressive language style
A style of vocabulary development in which early lexicons contain relatively fewer objects labels and relatively more words that serve social functions than do the early lexicons of children with a referential language style. See also Referential language style.
overextensions
A type of error in children's early word usage that seems to reflect an overly inclusive meaning in the mind of the child (such as referring to all four-legged animals as "doggie")
whole-object assumption
A word learning constraint according to which children assume that a new word refers to a whole object, not toa part or property of an object.
nominals
A word that labels things. A common noun
mutual-exclusivity assumption
A word-learning constraint according to which children assume that objects can have only a single name.
mental lexicon
Dictionary in the head. The knowledge of words that speakers of a language possess.
lexical principles
The assumptions about how the lexicon works that are attributed to the child in order to explain how word learning is so successful and rapid. Lexical Principles guide the child in mapping new words to meaning by constraining the possible interpretations of new words that children must consider. The whole object assumption and mutual exclusivity are tow examples.
taxonomic assumption
The child's assumption that words label categories of things of the same kind (taxonomic categories). This assumption is proposed as one word learning constraint that helps children learn the meaning of new words.
phonological memory
The function of short-term memory responsible for the temporary storage of the sound of a speech stimulus.
syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis
The hypothesis that children find and use clues to the meaning of new words in the syntactic structure of the sentences in which new words are encountered.
word spurt
The increase in the rate at which children acquire new words; it occurs sometime around the achievement of a 50-word vocabulary, or about 18 months of age.
mapping problem
The logical problem of learning word meanings that arises because an infinite number of hypotheses about word meaning may be consistent with information in the nonlinguistic context of use.
speech segmentation
The mental process of separating the speech stream into separate words.
reference
The notion of words as symbols that stand for their referents.
natural partitions hypothesis
The notion that the world makes obvious the things that take nouns as labels, that is, that the meanings that nouns encode are natural chunks of meaning. That makes the task of learning nouns one in which the child must simply find the label- the meaning is provide outside of language. Compare Relational relativity hypothesis.
relational relativity hypothesis
The notion that verb meanings do not naturally emerge from the structure of the world. This leaves open the possibility that verb meaning will vary from language to language and thus children will have to figure out verb meanings from hearing the verb in use. Compare Natural partitions hypothesis.
semantic organization
The organization of meanings as expressed in a language, as distinct from cognitive organization.
fast mapping
The process children engage in when they hypothesize a meaning for a newly heard word on the basis of hearing the word once or at most a few times.
word extension
The range of exemplars to which a word refers.
lexical organization
The way in which the mental lexicon represents the relation between words and meanings.
underextensions
Using words with a range of meanings narrower than the meaning of the word in the target language (such as using car to refer only to cars seen from a window.)
context-bound word use
Word use that is tied to particular contexts.
referential words
Words whose use is not bound to one particular context.
