Bootstrapping the early lexicon: how do children use old knowledge to create new meanings?

Abstract

Compared to other aspects of language development, such as acquiring grammar, we perhaps take for granted the complexity of building a lexicon. More than 50 years ago the philosopher W.V.O. Quine provided a now famous example of what makes word learning so difficult. In short, Quine (1960) argues that when we hear a new word, how can we ever precisely determine its meaning? This problem has concerned many child language researchers, who all acknowledge that the child requires a means of narrowing down the infinite possible meanings of a word. However, researchers have advocated contrasting theoretical perspectives on how this problem is solved. For many, the child's ability to learn new words requires external input from the speaker—not just the word uttered, but also overt “clues” such as pointing and eye gaze (e.g., Bloom, 2000). Others argue that the child brings their own tools to the task, whether in the form of domain-specific heuristics (e.g., Golinkoff et al., 1994), or domain-general mechanisms (e.g., Samuelson and Smith, 2000).

One simple solution is to use existing vocabulary knowledge to decode the meanings of new words. This strategy is commonly known as mutual exclusivity—the assumption that an object can only have one name (Markman, 1989, 1990). If a child is faced with more than one possible referent of a new word, she will map the word to whichever referent they cannot name. Word learning in this manner is a form of “bootstrapping” in language development, where existing lexical knowledge can be exploited in order to acquire new lexical knowledge. Alternative explanations of this word learning behavior include the novel-name-nameless-category (N3C) principle (Mervis and Bertrand, 1994) and the principle of contrast (Clark, 1987). In spite of extensive research into mutual exclusivity (and related theoretical accounts), many aspects of this phenomenon are not well-understood, such as the underlying cognitive mechanisms and developmental origins.