Yesenia Barrientos Castillo 15/05/2020

Laura Paola Hernández Betancourt

Psycholinguistics Final Project
Chapter 4
Acquisition of Meaning
Introduction
In this chapter we will find the different issues and the different strategies and elements that are present at the
moment a child learn the meaning of words, this may look like an easy thing because we don´t really see the
process but once we get to understand every elements maybe we’ll be able to find out how this works because
it is important in order to acquire language, because without knowing what the words mean this can let us to a
very difficult path towards knowing what other people say as well as communicating. The child needs to
understand the words they are saying and what the mean in order for them to acquire a more adult-like
language. In this chapter we will also be seen how we applied some of these elements in order to analyze our
case study which is a 2 year old kid.

Issues in the Acquisitions of Meaning

When it comes to acquiring the meaning of words when we are children we have to study several issues that
makes harder to understand the way children acquire language but they are necessary for us to find the best
answers as well for us to keep in mind while studying the acquiring of meaning in words for children.
Comprehension-Production
In this part of the issues we can see that children commonly seem to understand much more that what they
can say and they are able to respond to this accordingly because they are very good at interpreting adult’s
gestures; people have shown that children rely on gestures in order to understand the adults by this they direct
their attention and then do what looks like according to the context one example can be when an adults says
Why can’t you ever shot the door? They ask this question while gesturing towards the door, this gives the
children a little context about the door shutting it. With the example we can deduct a problem which is how
much children understand from the words given alone during the different stages of acquisition, another
problem is tat the children start to use the words when the give a certain meaning to it like saying bow-wow to
every single four leg animal making this is a mistake of the children’s mapping because the concepts is not
exactly what the words meant and this is a problem of production and we need to understand a it more of the
comprehension they have specially when the children have no-linguistic cues to interpretation as well as
observing what the children says, specifically one word and the context of it in order to identify a semantic
hypothesis and the strategies for using new words.

Complexity of Meaning
The complexity in language structure is important for us to see how this affects the different word endings, the
function, and the semantics of language in children. Word endings that only express one single concept are
learned earlier as those that have more conceptual content one example can be the word give which it´s
meaning is simply to transfer an object from person A to person B, while the word sell has more meaning that
may be harder for a kid to learn because this time will be saying that it is to transfer money from A to B in order
for B to exchange it for something else; this gives complexity to the words, and complexity is determinant to
Yesenia Barrientos Castillo 15/05/2020
Laura Paola Hernández Betancourt
order in which child acquire word endings. Another issue may be that semantic complexity can take other
forms; this field the simpler meaning needs to be worked out first than the more complex. Conceptual
complexity cannot be used to see which meaning will be easier or harder to acquire because this depends on
the child and the individual experiences and environment they are surrounded by.

Hypotheses and Strategies

Children do interpretations of words in order for them to acquire meaning, in doing this they start with to
assumptions or hypothesis about language; the first one is that language is for people to communicate and the
second one is that language makes sense in context. The first assumption is created due to the reliance in the
gestures because they are always accompanied by some speech from the adult’s end and they infer that
language is for communication; and assumption number two is made by the reasonable connection between
what the speaker says and the situation they are in. The children relay in the “here and now” (2003) at the
moment they work out the meaning of words and their first step is making a sort of hypothesis by basing
themselves in their conceptual knowledge in this way the child ties up the meaning with the word to something
he already knows. The next step is for them to come up with a strategy for using and understanding any word,
the strategy can be to look around and assume that’s what the speaker was talking about with all the
information they were given. For this they select a possible meaning from what they already know, with this
they take the meaning and how to use it in other occasions. The strategies the child use help us understand
the kind of information they take under consideration to form a meaning and how this can evolve into adult
meanings.

Conceptual Knowledge Vs Semantic Knowledge

The general knowledge people have about the world is the mental encyclopedia they have while their
knowledge in words is the lexicon they can use. Some of this concept can be expressed universally in
languages. So one of the goals is to discover how children find the connection between those conceptual
domains and the linguistic devices in the learned language Children semantic knowledge consists of the
lexical entries they’ve worked in order to get particular concepts with the mapping and make it part of their
knowledge in semantics (Clark&Clark, 2003). The relationship between conceptual knowledge and semantic
knowledge is made by what the child built with what he already knows, the entire process of creating a
hypothesis and strategies to a particular word create a mapping problem, for this first you need to examine the
early word meaning englobing verbs and nouns; the second part take the strategies use in the acquisition of
words for relationships and at last the semantic components.

Overlap with Under-Extension

The overlap with under-extension is when the child denotes only one set of items included in adult category
(Clark&Clark, 2003). Here the children may fail to use a word for many reasons these can be because he is
very sleepy, restless or focusing on something else; under-extension represents the very first stage in the
acquisition of each new word meaning that the kid may use kitten just for the family pet but later on he will use
Yesenia Barrientos Castillo 15/05/2020
Laura Paola Hernández Betancourt
it for every single cat. This overlap requires children to adjust the meaning they first had in order for it to adjust
the one adult have.

Meanings with No Overlap

Then there is the possibility that the child’s meaning does not overlap with the one the adult has. For example
when the child says bye and instead of using it as a way to let someone know that they are leaving they use it
for when they play with toys and points to something and says it meaning the toy but instead they say bye.
This happens when the kid is not provided with a basis in the communication and the children abandon such
words quickly. This happens in the very first few months when they use a new word, but they drop it
immediately. Since children rarely het the adult word right they may spend several years adjusting themselves
and their hypothesis, these mistakes provide important insight into the process they use to acquire meaning.

Overlap with Over-Extensions

The overlap with Over-Extensions is addressed by researchers as cases when child’s meaning overlaps with
adult’s in a way, but he uses that same meaning to extends it beyond. An example, of this is when a child uses
a word to referring an animal, a dog for example, and he keeps using this to refers other animals like a cow, a
horse, etc. so in general words, he puts them in the same category and the words represents that category.
Some authors even mentioned examples of this in the analysis they made on some children, like Perez (1892)
when he narrated how his own child used the word mou, for indeterminate drawings that were in a horizontal
line with four downward projections as he did for most animal. Other category could be texture, the author
mentioned how in the same example of the dog, a child can pick a word for other ‘fluffy’ animals.
Over-extensions overlaps are divided in two ways, the first one is ‘a pure over-extension’ where a child is likely
to pick one or two properties in a critical way for the use of a specific word. The other one is called ‘mixed
over-extension’ and this one refers when children use a word that share the original referent in different
situations.

The following tables shows the categorizations of the different over-extensions. Table 13-1 shows words were
over-extended to other objects in the order listed in the right-hand column based in shape, while Table 13-2
shows the same but based in movement, size, sound and texture.
Yesenia Barrientos Castillo 15/05/2020
Laura Paola Hernández Betancourt

(Example in a table)
VIDEO COUNTER P DIALOGUE Domain of Application
(shape, movement, color,
sound, texture)

2 0:05 I ¿Es una torre grande o chiquita? Shape

2 0:08 B / ’gande / Shape
2 0:10 I ¡Grande! Mira, yo construí una torre, ¿es Shape
una torre grande o chiquita?
2 0:14 B / ti’kita / Shape
2 0:16 I ¡Si, chiquita muy bien! Shape
2 0:19 I ¿Este que color es? Color
2 0:20 B / ‘dojo / Color
2 0:21 I ¿Y este? Color
2 0:22 B / ‘erde / Color
2 0:23 I ¡Aja! ¿Y este? Color
2 0:24 B / o’ ɲay / Color
2 0:25 I ¡Orange! ¿Y este? Color
2 0:27 B / ‘puda / Color
2 0:28 I ¡Muy bien! Color

Conclusion
In the prior table we showed ‘Eduardo Quintero Gonzalez’ analysis where we give examples of shape and
color, we did this with the propose to test all the statements referring to overlap with over-extensions. In this
case we were expecting to see any kind of ‘over-extensions’ but in case we faced with the fact that we weren’t
able to find any, at least in the sequential part where we tried to analyze this event. Here you can see how the
Yesenia Barrientos Castillo 15/05/2020
Laura Paola Hernández Betancourt
baby actually answer correctly all the questions referring to the shape and color concepts, we didn’t overlap
any of the concepts. There are a few factors that can be affecting this, one is that maybe because in his school
he had already see all this concepts, not allowing him to categorize them since he was attending kinder
garden at a very young age. Other one is that as we already mentioned the baby had two older sisters so
maybe by imitations, he could learn the difference.

Conclusion
What I learned through out this chapter is that the process in which children learn the meaning of the words is
very complex and even though we don’t see it the children brain is very intelligent, it has a lot of functions an
all of them are happening at the same time which mean they are always trying to understand the world they
are surrounded by, trying to communicate. We don´t realize that the brain can do so much until we analyze it.
The children’s process into acquiring language is very vast and interesting and we can see that in order for
use to get to an adults language it take a lot of brain activity; a lot of strategies and hypothesis that help us
achieve it specially as kids. Is important for us to understand and analyze it in order to acknowledge the fact
that getting to communicate the way we do as adults we needed to first analyze the people that are in our
surrounding as well as the things we see day by day for us to get context on what we are trying to say. I think
that this was a very fulfilling and interesting chapter for us linguists.

Bibliography
Clark&Clark. (2003). Language Acquisition. Stanford University.