Abstract
The classic mapping metaphor posits that children learn a word by mapping it onto a concept of an object or event. However, we believe that a mapping metaphor cannot account for word learning, because even though children focus attention on objects, they do not necessarily remember the connection between the word and the referent unless it is framed pragmatically, that is, within a task. Our theoretical paper proposes an alternative mechanism for word learning. Our main premise is that word learning occurs as children accomplish a goal in cooperation with a partner. We follow Bruner’s (1983) idea and further specify pragmatic frames as the learning units that drive language acquisition and cognitive development. These units consist of a sequence of actions and verbal behaviors that are co-constructed with a partner to achieve a joint goal. We elaborate on this alternative, offer some initial parametrizations of the concept, and embed it in current language learning approaches.
Highlights
The direct mapping of words onto concepts has often been considered to be at the core of the language acquisition mechanism
We propose that pragmatic frames serve as a communicative foundation or a learning “matrix” (Bruner, 1983, p. 38) that emerges between interactants, and that they are the key to understanding ecological learning processes
We think that the concept of “pragmatic frame” helps us to understand the co-development of cognitive and communicative dispositions in children
Summary
The direct mapping of words onto concepts has often been considered to be at the core of the language acquisition mechanism. For example, a guessing game in which a child is asked where the lamp is, and she or he points to it When performing this speech act, a competent speaker knows that the goal has to be framed by a sequence of actions on the surface layer (1) such as looking at the listener and asking a question with a specific prosody and syntax that contains a slot for the requested object. In in the Talking Head experiment (Steels and Kaplan, 2002), language games allowed robotic agents to successfully negotiate new semantic representations in which words were used as cues to draw the attention of social peers to a shared referent In such models, language acquisition goes far beyond the mapping mechanism and fits within the pragmatic frame approach we propose here. We specify the key characteristics of pragmatic frames
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