Beyond Names for Things by Merriman William Edward. Tomasello Michael

Author:Merriman, William Edward.,Tomasello, Michael.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317781813
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

OVERALL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

The purpose of this chapter has been to examine the possibility that infants begin the task of verb learning guided by a set of principles that ease their task. The discussion of this perspective was preceded by a discussion of the construct “verb” and a characterization of the syntactic and semantic characteristics of that word class. The emphasis in this discussion was on motion verbs—the class of verbs children use most often in their early language. Eight semantic factors that characterize motion verbs were identified, factors that are sometimes incorporated into the verb and sometimes encoded in separate morphemes, depending on the language. The link between these semantic elements and the kinds of primitive meanings infants construct from viewing events was discussed, drawing heavily on Mandler (1992). The meanings infants create from observing events, in the form of image-schemas, are the necessary substrate for verb learning. That is, having discriminated notions like path and causality from the flux and flow of events, infants arrive at the doorstep of language learning prepared to determine how their particular language maps onto these primitives.

We introduced the developmental lexical principles framework (Golinkoff et al., 1994), which contains a set of six lexical principles originally created to explain the acquisition of object labels. This framework describes how young children acquire these principles (some new and some previously proposed in the literature, e.g., Clark, 1983a, 1983b) in two tiers, as a result of their experience with observing how words work. We expanded this framework to include verbs and discussed a number of ways in which these extensions can be put to empirical test.

Now that this exercise has been completed, an evaluation of our efforts is in order. The first question is: When these principles are reworked to include verbs, are they variants of the same principles or do they become different principles? The second question is whether the positing of a set of principles for word learning helps us to understand the process of word learning. In particular, does such an approach suggest new research?

Question 1. Do the Lexical Principles Originally Posited for the Learning of Object Labels Work for the Learning of Action Labels? The answer is yes. For all the principles originally proposed, there was ready transfer to the learning of action labels. The principle of reference, for example, was originally formulated to include action labels. To learn verbs, children must be willing to hook up actions with action names. Yet reference, as foundational as it is for word learning, is still too unconstrained a principle to permit rapid word learning. A principle of the second tier, N3C, builds on the basic insight behind reference and allows word learning to occur with ease. N3C states that novel names are mapped to unnamed referents. By the time the child has N3C, the child may be able to distinguish between novel names and novel words from other form classes (see Waxman & Kosowski, 1990, for a demonstration that at 25 months of age children respond differently to novel adjectives than to novel nouns in a label extension task).

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