Ling 423/640G: Cognitive Linguistics

Ben Bergen

Meeting 25: Learning the meanings of words

November 25, 2008

How children learn the meanings of words

● Kids acquire about 60,000 words between age 1 and age 17.

● They do this without much direct teaching or explicit feedback

● No other animal or machine has this same capacity

● How do they do it?

Early learning

● First words are made up of words for:

● Things, people, animals, parts of things, social-interactional words

● Bloom's son Max's first 15 words:

airplane, apple, banana, belly-button, book, bottle, bye bye, car, daddy, diaper, dog, eye, kitty, light, mommy, and uh oh

● Words that kids learn first tend to be:

● about objects: they seem to have a whole-object bias both in language learning and in other aspects of cognition, like counting

● logically independent: words like dog can be understood without also understanding other words, but words like many cannot

● frequent: if the child doesn't hear the word a lot, she won't have a shot at learning it

● Fast mapping: Children can learn the meaning of a word after even just one exposure

Bring me the chromium tray, not the blue one.

So can dogs.