Bootstrapping the early lexicon: how do children use old knowledge to create new meanings?

摘要

Compared to other aspects of language development, such as acquiring grammar, we perhaps take for granted the complexity of building a lexicon. More than 50 years ago the philosopher W.V.O. Quine provided a now famous example of what makes word learning so difficult. In short, Quine (1960) argues that when we hear a new word, how can we ever precisely determine its meaning? This problem has concerned many child language researchers, who all acknowledge that the child requires a means of narrowing down the infinite possible meanings of a word. However, researchers have advocated contrasting theoretical perspectives on how this problem is solved. For many, the child's ability to learn new words requires external input from the speaker—not just the word uttered, but also overt “clues” such as pointing and eye gaze (e.g., Bloom, 2000). Others argue that the child brings their own tools to the task, whether in the form of domain-specific heuristics (e.g., Golinkoff et al., 1994), or domain-general mechanisms (e.g., Samuelson and Smith, 2000).