The acquisition of the multiple senses of with

Dados Bibliográficos

ID5138409
AutoresEvan Kidd (0000-0003-4301-2290, University of Manchester), Thea Cameron-Faulkner, Thea Cameron‐Faulkner (0000-0001-6928-4329, University of Manchester)
Ano2008
Volume46
Fascículo1
Data de publicação2008-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoLinguistics (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0024-3949 • E-ISSN: 1613-396X
EditoraWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/ling.2008.002
OpenAlexW2096249646
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas6
Referências citadas35

The present article reports on an investigation of one child's acquisition of the multiple senses of the preposition with from 2;0–4;0. Two competing claims regarding children's early representation and subsequent acquisition of with were investigated. The “multiple meanings” hypothesis predicts that children form individual form-meaning pairings for with as separate lexical entries. The “monosemy approach” (McKercher 2001) claims that children apply a unitary meaning by abstracting core features early in acquisition. The child's (“Brian”) speech and his input were coded according to eight distinguishable senses of with. The results showed that Brian first acquired the senses that were most frequent in the input (accompaniment, attribute, and instrument). Less common senses took much longer to emerge. A detailed analysis of the input showed that a variety of clues are available that potentially enable the child to distinguish among high frequency senses. The acquisition data suggested that the child initially applied a restricted one-to-one form-meaning mapping for with , which is argued to reflect the spatial properties of the preposition. On the basis of these results it is argued that neither the monosemy nor the multiple meanings approach can fully explain the data, but that the results are best explained by a combination of word learning principles and children's ability to categorize the contextual properties of each sense's use in the ambient language

Age of Acquisition · Categorization · Cognition · Cognitive psychology · Language acquisition · Linguistics · Meaning (existential) · Representation (politics) · Unitary state · Variety (cybernetics) · Word (group theory) · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Language Development and Disorders · Philosophy · Psychology · Reading and Literacy Development · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation