Abstract (may include machine translation)
By school age, children can name most objects in their surroundings, understand their functions and some of their properties, and even know their individual histories. Children acquire this knowledge effortlessly and at a pace that is nothing short of impressive: between ages four and six, children learn about 7-10 words a day (Anglin, 1993). This is remarkable considering that words are not predictive of their meaning: nothing about chairs perceptually indicates that the word “chair” is linked to them. The nonpredictive pairing between word forms and their meanings needs to be stored in semantic memory, and children perform this task effortlessly.
Children’s rapid acquisition of words has been extensively investigated. In their seminal study, Carey and Bartlett (1978) showed that limited exposure to novel words is sufficient for 3- and 4-year-olds to learn their meanings, and retain aspects of their meaning for a long time. Children learnt a novel color word, “chromium,” and after a month, most of them remembered that “chromium” was a color term, but not the exact color. The phenomenon of quickly identifying and learning the meaning of a word, termed “fast mapping,” has been documented for adjectives, nouns, and verbs (for a review, see Jaswal & Markman, 2001). Word learning is facilitated by the repetition (Woodward et al., 1994), or production of the novel word (Vlach & Sandhofer, 2012).
Children’s rapid acquisition of words has been extensively investigated. In their seminal study, Carey and Bartlett (1978) showed that limited exposure to novel words is sufficient for 3- and 4-year-olds to learn their meanings, and retain aspects of their meaning for a long time. Children learnt a novel color word, “chromium,” and after a month, most of them remembered that “chromium” was a color term, but not the exact color. The phenomenon of quickly identifying and learning the meaning of a word, termed “fast mapping,” has been documented for adjectives, nouns, and verbs (for a review, see Jaswal & Markman, 2001). Word learning is facilitated by the repetition (Woodward et al., 1994), or production of the novel word (Vlach & Sandhofer, 2012).
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 46th Boston University Conference on Language Development |
| Editors | Gong Ying, Kpogo Felix |
| Place of Publication | Somerville (MA) |
| Publisher | Cascadilla Press |
| Pages | 203-215 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-1-57473-077-7 |
| State | Published - 2022 |