Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-45l2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T07:10:03.498Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The contrastive hypothesis for the acquisition of word meaning: a reconsideration of the theory*†

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Virginia C. Gathercole
Virginia C. Gathercole*
Affiliation:
Florida International University
*
English Department, Florida International University, Miami, FL 33199, USA.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The evidence for the Contrastive Hypothesis (Clark 1980, 1983a, b, 1987, Barrett 1978, 1982) is reviewed. An examination of data from the acquisition of object words, relational words and superordinate terms reveals little support for this hypothesis that young children automatically assume that every two words in their lexicons contrast. Further, theoretical problems with the positions that children assign words to semantic fields as they are acquiring them and that innovations are used to fill lexical gaps make these stances untenable.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , October 1987 , pp. 493 - 531
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This research was conducted in part while I was on a 1985 NEH Summer Seminar on Issues in the Philosophy of Childhood at the University of Massachusetts. Thanks to Gary Matthews, the director of that seminar, and the other members of the seminar for their helpful criticisms and comments. Special thanks are also due to William Merriman and Melissa Bowerman for extensive comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

†

Replies to this article by Martyn Barrett and Eve Clark will be published in volume 15.

References

REFERENCES

Andersen, E. S. (1975). Cups and glasses: learning that boundaries are vague. Journal of Child Language 2. 79–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anglin, J. M. (1977). Word, object, and conceptual development. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Barrett, M. D. (1978). Lexical development and overextension in child language. Journal of Child Language 5. 205–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barrett, M. D. (1982). Distinguishing between prototypes: the early acquisition of the meaning of object names. In Kuczaj, S. A. (ed.), Language development. Vol. 1. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Barrett, M. D. (1986). Early semantic representations and early word-usage. In Kuczaj, S. & Barrett, M. D. (eds), The development of word meaning. New York: Springer-Verlag.Google Scholar
Bartlett, E. (1978). The acquisition of the meaning of color terms: a study of lexical development. In Campbell, R. & Smith, P. (eds), Recent advances in the psychology of language. New York: Plenum Press.Google Scholar
Bassano, D. (1985). Five-year-olds' understanding of ‘savoir’ and ‘croire’. Journal of Child Language 12. 417–32.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bates, E., Bretherton, I., Shore, C. & McNew, S. (1983). Names, gestures, and objects: symbolization in infancy and aphasia. In Nelson, K. E. (ed.), Children's language. Vol. 4. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Berndt, R. S. & Caramazza, A. (1978). The development of vague modifiers in the language of preschool children. Journal of Child Language 5. 279–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1978 a). Systematizing semantic knowledge: changes over time in the child's organization of word meaning. Child Development 49. 977–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1978 b). Words and sentences: uniformity, individual variation, and shifts over time in patterns of acquisition. In Minifie, F. D. & Lloyd, L. L. (eds), Communicative and cognitive abilities – early behavioral assessment. Baltimore: University Park Press.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1982). Starting to talk worse: clues to language acquisition from children's late speech errors. In Strauss, S. (ed.), U-shaped behavioral growth. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1986). What shapes children's grammars? In Slobin, D. I. (ed.), The cross-linguistic study of language acquisition. Vol. 2. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. (in press). Inducing the latent structure of language: the child's analysis of the input and the investigator's analysis of the child. In Kessel, F. (ed.), The development of language and language researchers. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Braine, M. D. S. (1976). Children's first word combinations. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 41. No. 164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, R. & Berko, J. (1960). Word association and the acquisition of grammar. Child Development 31. 1–14.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brown, R. & Hanlon, C. (1970). Derivational complexity and order of acquisition in child speech. In Hayes, J. R. (ed.), Cognition and the development of language. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Callanan, M. A. (1985). How parents label objects for young children: the role of input in the acquisition of category hierarchies. Child Development 56. 508–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Callanan, M. A. & Markman, E. M. (1982). Principles of organization in young children's natural language hierarchies. Child Development 53. 1093–1101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carey, S. (1978). The child as word learner. In Halle, M., Bresnan, J. & Miller, G. A. (eds), Linguistic theory and psychological reality. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar
Carey, S. & Bartlett, E. (1978). Acquiring a single new word. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 15. 17–29.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. (1973). What's in a word? On the child's acquisition of semantics in his first language. In Moore, T. E. (ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. (1980). Lexical innovations: how children learn to create new words. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 18. 1–24.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. (1983 a). Convention and contrast in acquiring the lexicon. In Seiler, T. B. & Wannenmacher, W. (eds), Concept development and the development of word meaning. New York: Springer-Verlag.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. (1983 b). Meanings and concepts. In Mussen, P. H. (ed.), Carmichael's manual of child psychology. Vol. 3. Cognitive development (edited by Flavell, J. H. & Markman, E. M.). New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. (1987). The principle of contrast: a constraint on language acquisition. In MacWhinney, B. (ed.), Mechanisms of language acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Clark, R. (1980). Errors in talking to learn. First Language 1. 7–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cruse, D. A. (1977). A note on the learning of colour names. Journal of Child Language 4. 305–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dockrell, J. E. (1981). The child's acquisition of unfamiliar words: an experimental study. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Stirling, Scotland.Google Scholar
Donaldson, M. (1979). Children's minds. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Ehri, L. C. (1976). Comprehension and production of adjectives and seriation. Journal of Child Language 3. 369–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Entwisle, D. R., Forsyth, D. F. & Muus, R. (1964). The syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift in children's word associations. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 3. 19–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ervin, S. M. (1961). Changes with age in the verbal determinants of word association. American Journal of Psychology 74. 361–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fremgen, A. & Fay, D. (1980). Overextensions in production and comprehension: a methodological clarification. Journal of Child Language 7. 205–11.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fromkin, V. A. (ed.) (1973). Speech errors as linguistic evidence. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Fromkin, V. A. (ed.), (1980). Errors in linguistic performance: slips of the tongue, ear, pen, and hand. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. (1979). Birdies like birdseed the bester than buns: a study of relational comparatives and their acquisition. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kansas.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. (1982). Decrements in children's understanding of big: a reconsideration of the potential cognitive and linguistic causes. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 34. 156–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. (1983). Haphazard examples, prototype theory, and the acquisition of comparatives. First Language 4. 169–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. (1985). ‘He has too much hard questions’: the acquisition of the mass-count distinction in much and many. Journal of Child Language 12. 395–415.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gathercole, V. C. (1986). Evaluating competing linguistic theories with child language data: the case of the mass-count distinction. Linguistics and Philosophy 9. 151–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gentner, D. (1978). On relational meaning: the acquisition of verb meaning. Child Development 49. 988–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gentner, D. (1981). Some interesting differences between verbs and nouns. Cognition and Brain Theory 4. 161–78.Google Scholar
Gentner, D. (1982). Why nouns are learned before verbs: linguistic relativity versus natural partitioning. In Kuczaj, S. A. (ed.), Language development: language, thought, and culture. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Gordon, P. (1982). The acquisition of syntactic categories: the case of the count/mass distinction. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Harris, P. (1975). Inferences and semantic development. Journal of Child Language 2. 143–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, P. L., Morris, J. E. & Terwogt, M. M. (1986). The early acquisition of spatial adjectives: a cross-linguistic study. Journal of Child Language 13. 335–52.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979). Micro- and macrodevelopmental changes in language acquisition and other representational systems. Cognitive Science 3. 91–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1983). Language acquisition as a problem-solving process. In Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 22. 1–22.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1985). A constructivist approach to modelling linguistic and cognitive development. Archives de Psychologie 53, 113–26.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1986). Stage/structure versus phase/process in modelling linguistic and cognitive development. In Levin, I. (ed.), Stage and structure. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1973). The boundaries of words and their meanings. In Bailey, C.-J. N. & Shuy, R. W. (eds), New ways of analyzing variation in English. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Leopold, W. F. (1939). Speech development of a bilingual child: a linguist's record. Vol. 1. New York: AMS Press.Google Scholar
Lumsden, E. A. & Poteat, B. (1968). The salience of the vertical dimension in the concept of ‘bigger’ in five- and six-year-old children. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 7. 404–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macnamara, J. (1982). Names for things: a study of human learning. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar
Macnamara, J. (1986). A border dispute: the place of logic in psychology. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar
Maratsos, M. P. (1973). Decrease in the understanding of the word ‘big’ in preschool children. Child Development 44. 747–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maratsos, M. P. (1979). How to get from words to sentences. In Aaronson, D. & Rieber, R. (eds), Psycholinguistic research: implications and applications. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Markman, E. M., Horton, M. S. & McLanahan, A. G. (1980). Classes and collections: principles of organization in the learning of hierarchical relations. Cognition 8. 227–41.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Markman, E. M. & Seibert, J. (1976). Classes and collections: internal organization and resulting holistic properties. Cognitive Psychology 8. 561–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merriman, W. E. (1984). Change in a word meaning induced by the acquisition of a new word: a developmental study. Paper presented at the Ninth Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development Boston.Google Scholar
Merriman, W. E. (1985). Emergence of a disposition toward lexical contrast. Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Toronto.Google Scholar
Merriman, W. E. (1986 a). How children learn the reference of concrete nouns: a critique of current hypotheses. In Kuczaj, S. A. & Barrett, M. D. (eds), The development of word meaning: progress in cognitive development research. New York: Springer-Verlag.Google Scholar
Merriman, W. E. (1986 b). Some reasons for the occurrence and eventual correction of children's naming errors. Child Development 57. 942–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mervis, C. B. & Canada, K. (1981). Child-basic categories and early lexical development. Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Boston.Google Scholar
Mervis, C. B. & Mervis, C. A. (1982). Leopards are kitty-cats: object labelling by mothers for their 13 month olds. Child Development 53. 267–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moran, L. J. (1973). Comparative growth of Japanese and North American cognitive dictionaries. Child Development 44. 862–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moran, L. J. & Huang, I-N. (1974). Note on cognitive dictionary structure of Chinese children. Psychological Reports 34. 154.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, K. (1977). The syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift revisited: a review of research and theory. Psychological Bulletin 84. 93–116.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nelson, K. (1979). Features, contrasts and the FCH: some comments on Barrett's lexical development hypothesis. Journal of Child Language 6. 139–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, K. E. & Bonvillian, J. D. (1973). Concepts and words in the two-year-old: acquisition of concept names under controlled conditions. Cognition 2. 435–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, K. E. & Bonvillian, J. D. (1978). Early language development: conceptual growth and related processes between 2 and 4½ years of age. In Nelson, K. E. (ed.), Children's language. Vol. 1. New York: Gardner Press.Google Scholar
Nelson, K. E. & Nelson, K. (1978). Cognitive pendulums and their linguistic realization. In Nelson, K. (ed.), Children's language. Vol. 1. New York: Gardner Press.Google Scholar
Pye, C. (1986). One lexicon or two? An alternative interpretation of early bilingual speech. Journal of Child Language 13. 591–3.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ravn, K. E. & Gelman, S. A. (1984). Rule usage in children's understanding of ‘big’ and ‘little’. Child Development 55. 2141–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rescorla, L. A. (1980). Overextension in early language development. Journal of Child Language 7. 321–35.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rescorla, L. A. (1981). Category development in early language. Journal of Child Language 8. 225–38.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rice, M. (1980). Cognition to language: Categories, word meanings and training. Baltimore: University Park Press.Google Scholar
Richards, M. M. (1982). Empiricism and learning to mean. In Kuczaj, S. A. (ed.), Language development. Vol. 1. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Shipley, E. F., Kuhn, I. F. & Madden, E. C. (1983). Mothers' use of superordinate category terms. Journal of Child Language 10. 571–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomson, J. R. & Chapman, R. S. (1977). Who is ‘Daddy’ revisited: the status of two-year-olds' over-extended words in use and comprehension. Journal of Child Language 4. 359–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, T. G. (1982). Naming practices, typicality, and underextension in child language. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 33. 324–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar