LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 17:12 December 2017
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
         Renuga Devi, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.
         Dr. S. Chelliah, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Word-to-World Mapping or Syntactic Cues?
Lexical Development in First Language Acquisition

Basheer Ahmed Hamood Mufleh
Research Scholar

Abstract

In the acquisition of words, the most complicated question that several studies have tried to efficiently answer is how children learn words, particularly how they attain words’ meanings. It has always been hard to explain the rapid development of children’s lexicons. The present paper discusses different accounts for lexical development starting from the time children begin segmenting words from fluent speech till the time they have to match concepts and words. It looks into different accounts for concept-word matching and highlights their pros and cons. The argument is that Word-to- World mapping is insufficient for identifying words that are abstract. Mapping contingencies are another problem; a child will not hear the word ‘open’ every time the door is opened. Constrained-word learning can help children identify some words in the prelexical stage before they have access to syntactic cues. By the time children get access to the syntactic cues, they can effortlessly identify concrete and abstract words without much help from cognitive abilities. Studies have shown that in spite of the cognitive level adults reach, they could not identify the meanings of novel words in the absence of syntactic cues. Identifying words is strongly influenced by syntactic cues; little help comes from semantics and cognitive development.

Keywords: constrained-word learning, mapping, statistical mechanism, syntactic/ semantic cues, cognitive development.

Introduction

Language learning involves a complicated perceptual task from the very beginning. During the first months of life, children get exposed to the sounds of the language and at the onset of language learning, the primary task is segmenting sounds from the flow of speech. Once identification of sounds is accomplished, the focus of learning moves to the learning of words. Equipped with the sounds of the language, children will then face the startling complexity of identifying words. They need to match concepts with words in the language, but the problem lies in the fact that all do not neatly map to words. Also, concepts are not all alike, and what might work for some might not work for others. Only after storing recognizable words do children begin to observe the distribution and arrangement of these words in sentences. The question to be answered here is: how does learning of ordering of words take place?

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.


Basheer Ahmed Hamood Mufleh
Department of Linguistics
University of Kerala
Kariavattom Campus
Thiruvananthapuram 695581
Kerala
India
bmufleh@gmail.com

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