4 The meaning of words
Over days, months and years, children learn the meanings of words with increasing confidence, speed and accuracy, making remarkably few errors given the scale and complexity of the system they are acquiring. There is an acceleration in the pace, equivalent to learning one new word every two waking hours, such that by 6 years of age children know something like 10,000 words (Anglin, 1993). Speech production and comprehension starts out slow and effortful, but it eventually becomes quick and automatic. Fluent speakers in conversation typically utter three words a second and recognise a word within 20 milliseconds (Frauenfelder and Tyler, 1987).
Because words are predominantly arbitrary agreements between like-minded speakers, children must be prepared to learn them on a case-by-case basis, for any one (or more) of the 7,000 or so diverse vocabularies of the world. No other species comes close to this flexibility of communicative form and function, and for human children this impressive feat is achieved by many different skills maturing together and interacting in complex ways (Bloom, 2000; Evans, 2009).
Compared with younger children, older children can focus for longer periods and are better at remembering words; they are more adept at working out what other people mean and more skilled at working with others to construct meaning together; better able to use what language they do know to work out the parts they do not; and have developed more strategies to repair and reformulate language when the meaning is not clear. Children also get better at the business of learning itself, becoming more efficient at mapping new words to old concepts and using known words to talk about (or around) new ideas.
Activity 1 What is a fep?
Let’s look at one strategy children use to work out what words mean. As the name implies, syntactic bootstrapping is the idea is that children can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and infer the meaning of a novel word by the grammatical company it keeps. As you read the examples of the novel word ‘fep’ in Table 1, take a best guess about what it might mean, before you read its usual interpretation.
| Examples in English and Spanish for the novel word Fep | Syntactic type | Usual interpretation | |
|---|---|---|---|
| This is a fep | Esto es un fep | Singular count noun | Individual member of a category |
| These are feps | Estos son unos fepes | Plural count noun | Multiple members of a category |
| I see Fep | Veo a Fep | Lexical noun phrase | Specific individual |
| Here is some fep | Aquí hay fep | Mass noun | Non-individuated stuff |
| This is a fep dog | Este es un perro fepo | Adjective | Property of object |
| The dog ran fepply | El perro corrió fepadamente | Adverb | Type of action |
| The dog is fep the table | El perro esta fep la mesa | Preposition | Spatial relationship |
| He feps | El fepa | Intransitive verb | Action with one participant |
| He feps the dog | El fepa al perro | Transitive verb | Action with two participants |
| He gives the fep to Mary | El le da el fep a María | Direct object of double object construction | X causes Y to receive Z |
| He fepped a dog to Mary | El fepeó un perro a María | Verb in the caused-motion construction | X causes Y to move (to/from) Z |
| He fepped her crazy | El la fepeó loca | Verb in resultative construction | X causes Y to become Z |
Comment
If you had an intuition on what ‘fep’ meant in any of these examples, notice that it couldn’t have come from the word itself, the social context, any visual referent or common ground between one another. It must have been something in the linguistic context that made construing ‘fep’ one way or another feel more natural, and there is lots of experimental evidence children also capitalise on this information to infer the meanings of words (Fisher et al., 2010). For example, 2 year olds who hear the transitive sentence ‘the duck is kradding the bunny’ look longer at the event in which a duck acted on a bunny than at an event in which the duck and bunny acted independently, while those that heard the intransitive sentence ‘the duck and the bunny are kradding’ did not (Naigles, 1990). Given that the children didn’t know what ‘kradding’ meant they had to work it out for themselves. They looked longer at the picture that matched the meaning of kradding as if they were using the syntactic context as a cue to the word’s meaning. Young children take parts-of-speech categories as a useful clue that can narrow the range of possible meanings of a new word.