Word learning: the scope of the problem

Much of this volume is concerned with the problem of how children learn the meanings of words, or more exactly morphemes of various kinds. The answers may depend on many factors of course: different kinds of morphemes may be, indeed must be, learnt in different ways, the ways themselves may be opened up by conceptual development within the child over time, and so on. However, we can (not without some danger) abstract away from these divergent factors and ask general questions about the scope of the “induction” or “mapping” problem.

Now in the chapters that immediately precede, those by Bowerman & Choi, de León, and Brown, an issue is raised that has significant bearing on the dimensions of the “mapping problem.”What these chapters show is that, in a number of spatial domains, the kinds of categories that need to be associated with the meanings of words can vary rather drastically across languages, and moreover that, at least by the beginning of systematic speech, there is no evidence of a uniform initial state of the learning machine, i.e. little evidence that children are presuming certain kinds of natural categories, later discarding them in favor of the local idiosyncrasies. Nor does this picture change when one starts to plumb comprehension before the age of complex utterance production. In short, the semantic categories look almost as variable as the phonological strings onto which they must be mapped.