Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of contributors
- I INTRODUCTION
- II RELATIONS BETWEEN WORD LEARNING AND CATEGORIZATION
- 2 Acquisitional principles in lexical development
- 3 The whole-object, taxonomic, and mutual exclusivity assumptions as initial constraints on word meanings
- 4 Convergences between semantic and conceptual organization in the preschool years
- 5 Language and categorization: The acquisition of natural kind terms
- 6 Theories, concepts, and the acquisition of word meaning
- III LOGICAL, CAUSAL, AND TEMPORAL EXPRESSIONS
- IV THE ROLE OF SOCIAL INTERACTION
- Author index
- Subject index
4 - Convergences between semantic and conceptual organization in the preschool years
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of contributors
- I INTRODUCTION
- II RELATIONS BETWEEN WORD LEARNING AND CATEGORIZATION
- 2 Acquisitional principles in lexical development
- 3 The whole-object, taxonomic, and mutual exclusivity assumptions as initial constraints on word meanings
- 4 Convergences between semantic and conceptual organization in the preschool years
- 5 Language and categorization: The acquisition of natural kind terms
- 6 Theories, concepts, and the acquisition of word meaning
- III LOGICAL, CAUSAL, AND TEMPORAL EXPRESSIONS
- IV THE ROLE OF SOCIAL INTERACTION
- Author index
- Subject index
Summary
The gentleman who is discriminating about his wine … can consistently apply nouns to the different fluids of a class and he can apply adjectives to the differences between the fluids.
Gibson and Gibson (1955, p. 35)Our enduring fascination with issues concerning language and thought may derive from our sense that these are uniquely human capacities. Despite years of devoted tutoring, even our closest genealogical relatives have yet to acquire the complex and creative linguistic systems that human infants master within the first few years of life (Petitto & Seidenberg, 1979; Premack, 1971). And although members of other species surely manifest sophisticated conceptual and representational capacities, these appear to be accessible to them only under restricted conditions (Rozin, 1976). Findings like these lend substance to the intuition that humans are uniquely endowed with the capacity to build complex, flexible, and creative linguistic and conceptual systems.
Recent research has documented the remarkable rate at which very young children naturally acquire language and develop rich conceptual systems. Researchers estimate that by the time children reach 2 years of age, they learn an average of six new words each day (Templin, 1957). They also have at their command a rich variety of conceptual relations (e.g., taxonomic, thematic, and associative relations) with which they organize and categorize the objects and events they encounter in their lives.
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- Information
- Perspectives on Language and ThoughtInterrelations in Development, pp. 107 - 145Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991
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