The Acquisition of
Meaning
Eve V. Clark
Stanford University
Children acquire meaning in the course of conversation. In
this course, we will look at evidence for some of the major factors that appear
to underlie young children's meaning acquisition, from prior cognitive
development and conceptual categories, the role of joint attention along with
physical and conversational co-presence, to pragmatic inferences in context
from what adults say. We will look at evidence from observational data on
adult-child exchanges and from word-learning experiments, and at how pragmatic
principles like conventionality and contrast support the process of
acquisition.
Sesssion #1 – Children learn language in conversation with joint attention,
physical and conversational co-presence
• Overview of how adults talk to children, and the range of information offered about language in both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ form; shifts in adult speech as children get older; the roles of joint attention, physical co-presence, and conversational co-presence in adult-child and adult-adult speech.
• Readings:
Clark, E. V. (2003). In conversation with children. (Ch. 2, from First Language Acquisition, pp. 22-54, Cambridge University Press.)
Tomasello, M. (1995). Joint attention as social cognition. In: C. Moore & P. J. Dunham (eds.), Joint attention: its origin and role in development (103-130). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Session #2 – First words and word meanings; innate constraints?
• Children’s early words and word uses. ‘Fast-mapping’ in assigning preliminary meanings. Are there innate constraints on word meanings? Do these constrain children’s view of lexical structure? How are such constraints over-ridden?
• Readings:
Clark, E. V. (1973). What’s in a word? On the child’s acquisition of semantics in his first language. In T. E. Moore (ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language (65-110). New York: Academic Press.
Markman, E. M., & Wachtel, G. (1988). Children’s use of mutual exclusivity to constrain the meanings of words. Cognitive Psychology20, 121-157
Session
#3 – Pragmatic constraints on word meaning
• An alternative view: children’s assignments of meanings to words are constrained by the same pragmatic principles at play in adult-adult conversation. Pragmatic constraints on early meanings: conventionality and contrast in language use. Are these principles consistent with (adult) lexical structure and meaning relations? How are they related to any ‘innate constraints’?
• Readings:
Clark, E. V., & Grossman, J. G. (1997). Pragmatic directions and children’s word learning. Journal of Child Language 25, 1-18.
Disesendruck, G. (2005). The principles of conventionality and contrast in word learning: An empirical examination. Developmental Psychology 41, 451-463.
Clark, E. V. (2007). Conventionality and contrast in language acquisition. In M. Sabbagh & C. Kalish (Eds.), Conventionality in cognitive development: How children acquire shared representations in language, thought, and action (New Directions in Child & Adolescent Development, vol. 115). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Pp. 11-23.
Session
#4 – Taking a perspective as speaker
• Lexical choices reflect the perspective chosen by a speaker on an event: to what extent do children make choices to present the addressee with a specific (conceptual) perspective? How soon do children begin to contrast one perspective with another? What strategies do children rely on before they acquire the appropriate vocabulary for a domain?
Reading:
Clark, E. V. (1997). Conceptual perspective and lexical choice in acquisition. Cognition 64, 1-37.
Session
#5 – Getting both words and information about them from CDS
• Do adults offer information about new word meanings that is relevant and pertinent on the occasion of a word offer? What is the evidence that children take up such information?
• Readings:
Clark, E. V., & Wong, A. D-W. (2002). Pragmatic directions about language use: Words and word meanings. Language in Society 31, 181-212.
Clark, E. V., (2002). Making use of pragmatic inferences in the acquisition of meaning. In: D. Beaver, S. Kaufmann, B. Clark, & L. Casillas (eds.), The construction of meaning (45-58). Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Clark, E. V. (2007). Young children’s uptake of new words in conversation. Language in Society 36, 157-182.
Requirements
Eve
V. Clark
Stanford
University
Stanford,
California
USA
Eve Clark is the Richard W. Lyman Professor of Humanities and Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University. Educated in the United Kingdom and France, she has taught at Stanford since, with periodic visits to The Netherlands, the UK, and France. She is best known for her research on early meaning acquisition, her cross-linguistic studies of word-formation, her work on pragmatic principles in language acquisition and use, and on adult contributions to first language learning. She has published numerous research papers and several books – Psychology and Language 1977 (with H. H. Clark), The Ontogenesis of Meaning (1979), The Acquisition of Romance, with special reference to French 1985, The Lexicon in Acquisition 1993, First Language Acquisition 2003, and Constructions in Acquisition 2006 (with B. F. Kelly). She is a Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. She is currently working on the early acquisition of verbs in French.