ARTICLE REVIEW

SEMANTICS OF ACQUISITION

Hello awesome readers..

This time i’m going to share about an article review that i’ve done ( i dont know if its good or not ) the title of the article is Semantics Of Acquisition.

Semantics of acquisition is an article that is reviewed by Laura wagner from Ohie University. There are 10 pages in this article which is talking about semantics of acquisition.

This article looks at how children acquire various elements of linguistic meaning. Semantics is the study of how linguistic elements carry meaning. It sits squarely at the intersection between language and cognition, inextricably linked to the linguistic system which conveys meaning and the conceptual system which interprets it. In order to acquire the semantics of a language, a child must do three things: first, she must identify the relevant linguistic items, second, she must identify (and understand) the meanings these link to, and third, she must learn how the forms connect to the meanings. And a question arises, what special problem does each element of meaning pose for the child ?

To answer the question above the researcher use quantitative method, she collected several datas of children.

Word Meaning

Perhaps the most obvious way that language conveys meaning is through words. Every language contains thousands of vocabulary items that refer to concepts ranging from the concrete and mundane (bottle, ball) to the abstract and unusual (ponder, perplex). The primary challenge for acquiring word meanings is the problem of reference, or how symbolic elements such as word forms are linked to specific concepts. The essential nature of reference is one that has been much discussed by philosophers (including Frege 1892, Russell 1905, Kripke 1980, inter alia) and its fundamental mechanisms are still very much in dispute. Children do seem to appreciate the core dimension of reference, namely that things in the world correspond to words in language, and the rapid pace of their word learning (e.g., 5-year-olds often have vocabularies in excess of 10,000 words) attests to the ease with which they can make the link between word and meaning (see Bloom 2000). Beyond understanding that reference happens, children must also make correct referential links between form and meaning.

One strategy children could use is tracking the way the word is used over many different contextual scenes, or what has been called cross-situational observation. Over time, the variation in the scenes would eventually allow the child to identify the particular referent for each word. This process is surely part of the solution to Quine’s problem, but it cannot be the entire solution for both principled and practical reasons.

Children acquire word meanings extremely rapidly and they simply cannot wait for very many situations to settle on a meaning. Thus, in addition to cross-situational observation, children must have other means at their disposal for quickly and correctly making referential mappings. Researchers have found evidence to support several other such means that range throughout cognition and language. For example, children are highly sensitive to the social nature of reference – that is, that reference depends on human intentions – and consider social and intentional cues such as eyegaze and a speaker’s purposefulness when learning words (e.g. Baldwin 1991; see Tomasello 2001 for a review).

Much of the research on word learning has focused on children’s acquisition of basic open class vocabulary items (such as nouns and verbs). However, there are sub-domains of meaning that pose unique issues for the learning process, such as the sub-domain of space.

The strengthen of this article is the researcher uses a very simple and understandable words to explain the background of this article, everything is well-arranged and the problem is explained clearly by some examples and references.

On the other hand this article does not contain the detail data of the children who is being tested.

The conclusion is, in making the background of this article the researcher uses a simple words and understandable and everything is well-arranged. However this article also has the weaknes which is in the collecting data, the data is not detail yet.

Thats about my article review, i know there are mistakes that i’ve done on this posting. Hope it can be beneficial for you who read this post.

You can read the original article here :

faculty.psy.ohio-state.edu/wagner/documents/Wiley-AOS.pdf

Thank you J