Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: Advances in Korean psycholinguistics
- Part I Language acquisition
- 1 Acquisition of the subject and topic nominals and markers in the spontaneous speech of young children in Korean
- 2 The acquisition of argument structure and transitivity in Korean: a discourse-functional approach
- 3 Acquisition of case markers and grammatical functions
- 4 Do Korean children acquire verbs earlier than nouns?
- 5 The acquisition of the placement of the verb in the clause structure of Korean
- 6 Learning locative verb syntax: a crosslinguistic experimental study
- 7 Language-specific spatial semantics and cognition: developmental patterns in English and Korean
- 8 Acquisition of negation in Korean
- 9 The acquisition of Korean numeral classifiers
- 10 Acquisition of Korean reflexive anaphora
- 11 The Korean relative clause: issues of processing and acquisition
- 12 The accessibility hierarchy in Korean: head-external and head-internal relative clauses
- 13 Development of functional categories in child Korean
- 14 The acquisition of modality
- 15 The syntax of overmarking and kes in child Korean
- 16 Events in passive development
- 17 Universal quantification in child grammar
- 18 Acquisition of prosody in Korean
- 19 Korean as a heritage language
- 20 Maturational effects on L2 acquisition
- 21 L2 acquisition of English articles by Korean speakers
- 22 The acquisition of wanna contraction by adult Korean learners of English
- 23 Phonological abilities of Korean–English bilinguals
- 24 Parameters on languages in contact: an altered view of codeswitching
- 25 Influence of socio-psychological categories in bilingual interaction
- 26 Ontological concept versus shape in word learning from a crosslinguistic point of view
- 27 Notes on Korean Sign Language
- Part II Language processing
- References
- Name index
- Subject index
26 - Ontological concept versus shape in word learning from a crosslinguistic point of view
from Part I - Language acquisition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: Advances in Korean psycholinguistics
- Part I Language acquisition
- 1 Acquisition of the subject and topic nominals and markers in the spontaneous speech of young children in Korean
- 2 The acquisition of argument structure and transitivity in Korean: a discourse-functional approach
- 3 Acquisition of case markers and grammatical functions
- 4 Do Korean children acquire verbs earlier than nouns?
- 5 The acquisition of the placement of the verb in the clause structure of Korean
- 6 Learning locative verb syntax: a crosslinguistic experimental study
- 7 Language-specific spatial semantics and cognition: developmental patterns in English and Korean
- 8 Acquisition of negation in Korean
- 9 The acquisition of Korean numeral classifiers
- 10 Acquisition of Korean reflexive anaphora
- 11 The Korean relative clause: issues of processing and acquisition
- 12 The accessibility hierarchy in Korean: head-external and head-internal relative clauses
- 13 Development of functional categories in child Korean
- 14 The acquisition of modality
- 15 The syntax of overmarking and kes in child Korean
- 16 Events in passive development
- 17 Universal quantification in child grammar
- 18 Acquisition of prosody in Korean
- 19 Korean as a heritage language
- 20 Maturational effects on L2 acquisition
- 21 L2 acquisition of English articles by Korean speakers
- 22 The acquisition of wanna contraction by adult Korean learners of English
- 23 Phonological abilities of Korean–English bilinguals
- 24 Parameters on languages in contact: an altered view of codeswitching
- 25 Influence of socio-psychological categories in bilingual interaction
- 26 Ontological concept versus shape in word learning from a crosslinguistic point of view
- 27 Notes on Korean Sign Language
- Part II Language processing
- References
- Name index
- Subject index
Summary
Introduction
Children have learned over 14,000 words by age 6. It is estimated that children acquire about nine new words a day from the age of 18 months to 6 years (Carey, 1978). How do they acquire so many words at such a rapid rate? If children's acquisition of words involves an inductive process, i.e. unbiased hypothesis testing, then, their fast learning at an earlier stage is difficult to explain. Consider an example of a child learning a new word. A mother points to a rabbit and says ‘rabbit’ to her child. There seem unlimited possibilities that the child might guess the word is intended to describe. It could refer to the whole object (the rabbit), a part of the object (long ears, a tail, red eyes, a leg, etc.), the substance the object is made of (fur, bones, flesh, etc.), some property of the object (furry, white, dirty, etc.), and so on. In spite of an infinite set of possibilities about the novel word's meaning, the child rapidly and successfully connects the novel word to its meaning. This is the well-known inductive problem that Quine (1960) has posed. As a solution for this problem, many proposals have assumed that children might be equipped with certain implicit biases or constraints that narrow down the possibilities when ascribing meaning to a novel word (E. Clark, 1987; Landau, Smith & Jones, 1988; Markman, 1994; Soja, Carey & Spelke, 1991).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics , pp. 351 - 360Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009