A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words, but That's the Problem: The Role of Syntax in Vocabulary Acquisition

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ing the Relevant World Event A related problem is that the scene that accompanies utterance of a verb includes many events, only one of which is encoded by that verb. Consider the plight of the child to whom the mother says, Do you want this ice cream cone? The mother is speaking, smiling, holding and waving the cone, and perhaps pointing to it; the cone is observably something good to eat, dripping, Copyright ? 1992 American Psychological Society This content downloaded from 207.46.13.118 on Sun, 11 Sep 2016 06:25:19 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 32 VOLUME 1, NUMBER 1, FEBRUARY 1992 melting, an object of present desire, I and so forth. None of these aspects of the scene is irrelevant to the con versational intent, yet only one of them is correct to map onto the item want. A picture is worth a thousand words, but that is the trouble: A thousand words describe the varying aspects of any one picture. Usually, investigators have solved these problems only by beg ging the questions they raise. For ex ample, children are said to ignore adult utterances whose meanings are unrelated to the present context. But then, how do children avoid positing a different (and incorrect) pairing of the verb heard with some event that is present in the environ ment? That is, if the learner assumes that speech maps onto current events, and does not know the meaning of some utterance heard, she must attempt a pairing between that utterance and whatever is hap pening. Woe to such a learner, for in a case we mentioned earlier, she must then try to pair up Come take your nap with the cat-on-mat ob servation, a decidedly false step. As for abstract verbs, the prob lems they pose for observational learning are often waved aside be cause their acquisition is relatively late compared with the acquisition of action verbs?as if this lateness answers the question of how they are learned, in the end.