PSYC 354 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Pragmatics, Mass Noun
12 Mar 2019
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Some problems: words have other embedded words (e. g. fundamentalism) There are different segmentation strategies depending on the target language. Kids understand a whole lot more words than what they can produce. By about 18 months, kids go through a vocabulary explosion . Imagine you are are tasked with being a translator for an alien language. A rabbit hops by and the alien says gavagai . This is a problem children face when learning words. Taxonomic (type assumption): the assumption that a new word is likely to refer to objects of the same kind, not objects that are thematically related. Will assume that new words mean things that are the same kind. Mutual exclusivity: the idea that each object only has one label. How the constraints work in combination to figure out the meaning of a new word. No one disagrees that children are constrained in word learning.
