What Do Word Meanings Reveal About Conceptual Development?

Abstract

Our purpose here is to evaluate what early word meanings reveal about the child’s conceptual development. Regularities in the nature and order of acquisition of word meanings may reflect the child’s emerging ways of categorizing objects and events. If they do, word meanings would provide a powerful method for exploring conceptual development. One could then examine the acquisition of word meanings to determine whether different types of concepts differ in psychological complexity, whether certain concepts must be acquired in order for others to emerge, etc. However, one cannot simply assume that regularities in the acquisition of word meanings reflect the child’s evolving capacity to form concepts of particular sorts. Such regularities could instead be due to the ways words are presented to the child; in this case, his meanings would reflect the range of instances that adults name, and the order of acquisition of different words would reflect the frequency of their use. To evaluate the relative importance of the child’s conceptual capacities versus language input, it is necessary to determine whether the course of acquisition of word meanings is consistent with plausible models of conceptual development, with parents’ use of words, or both.KeywordsConceptual DevelopmentWord MeaningAction VerbPerceptual CategoryParent NamingThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.