Chapter 5 - Controversies in Language Acquisition: Word Learning and the Part of Speech

Abstract

This chapter focuses on something entirely new in the study of word learning. It reviews the status of a proposal first made by Roger Brown in a paper published in 1957 entitled “Linguistic determinism and the part of speech.” Brown found that the preschoolers tended to construe the verb as referring to the action, the count noun as referring to the object, and the mass noun as referring to the substance. Based on these findings, Brown speculated that “the part-of-speech membership of new word could operate as a filter selecting for attention probably relevant features of the nonlinguistic world and, more generally, “young English-speaking children take the part-of-speech membership of a new word as a clue to the meaning of the word.” This is a radical claim. Common sense tells that children learn the meanings of words by somehow drawing upon their understanding of the external world. Brown's proposal suggests an alternative mechanism, as it shifts the emphasis from the content of the situation toward the form of the linguistic expression.