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This chapter addresses characteristics of the single-word period, including definitions applied in this book and some areas of current controversy in lexical development. Topics covered include methods for studying children's entry into language, when a word is a word, the formation of patterns that represent objects and events, learning words, the holistic nature of single-word utterances, context-limited words, the nature of referential words, the rate of lexical development, and an analysis of Vihman and McCune data.

We show in a series of three related studies that intentional cues encoded in body movements can provide very specific gains to language learning. A computational model is developed on the basis of machine learning techniques which can identify sound patterns of individual words from continuous speech using non‐linguistic contextual information and employ body movements as deictic references to discover word‐meaning associations.

This chapter examines the interplay of dynamical systems and connectionism at the level of both theory and computation. It begins with a discussion of developmental mechanism focusing on two particular processes—one typically associated with connectionist approaches and one typically associated with dynamical systems. It then illustrates potential hybrid approaches with case studies from the field of language acquisition. The first—a model of speech category learning—illustrates how a dynamical systems perspective may inform a classic connectionist mechanism (i.e., statistical learning). The second—a model of early word learning—combines connectionist and dynamical systems principles. Both suggest that we can no longer treat these two paradigms as independent.

This chapter explores children's grasp of object names. It begins by reviewing the basic word-learning paradigm used to study children's symbol-mapping abilities. It then discusses the effect of manipulating symbol type and context within this prototypical paradigm and how those manipulations influence children's success at symbol mapping at various points in development. It argues that young children's seemingly symbolic behaviors likely precede symbolic insight.

This chapter contains the authors' reactions to the previous chapters and stresses the similarities and differences between these theoretical views. It discusses that part of the debate concerns whether the first words are more like the indexical signs of most nonhumans or like the symbols of the human 4-year-old. It argues that although there are marked contrasts between the views, the work of all the authors focuses on a central issue: an understanding of how infants break the language barrier by learning words.

This chapter discusses word learning in the context of the whole child. It states that Lois Bloom stresses how word learning forms a part of language development and how language emerges out of a nexus of other developments in emotion, cognition, and social connectedness. It adds that Bloom presents her views as an antidote to the MIT perspective, which highlights a language acquisition device instead of a real child. It discusses that Bloom consistently argues that language development must not be studied in isolation as the acquisition of a formal system.

This chapter discusses Amanda L. Woodward's summary of the bounty of research which claims that constraints play a role in word learning from the earliest stages. It adds that Woodward argues, for example, that there exists a bias to interpret words as labeling whole objects. It explains that on Woodward's view, word learning would be very difficult indeed if it were not biased in some way.

This chapter discusses the ideas pointed out by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and George Hollich. It stresses that multiple cues are necessary for word learning. In emergentist coalition model, Pasek, Golinkoff and Hollich argue that the intricacies of word learning demand a complex theory which presupposes an active child who integrates cues from the social, cognitive, perceptual and social domain. Using a new method — the Interactive Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm — they present a case for the transformation of the word-learning process over the 2nd year of life as the child comes to weigh the available cues differently with development.

This chapter expands a broad-based developmental theory of word learning (the emergentist coalition model [ECM]) to illuminate how children acquire language with a specific focus on verb acquisition. In so doing, it demonstrates how the theory of word learning originally developed for the understanding of noun learning can encompass the study of verbs. It also explains a persistent paradox in verb learning — why some verbs appear early even though the class of verbs is generally hard to master.

This chapter describes research findings from the social-pragmatic approach. It discusses that Nameera Akhtar and Michael Tomasello's dramatic findings demonstrate how word learning occurs in some fairly complex, nonostensive situations amid the flow of social interaction. It states that current models of word learning, as suggested by Akhtar and Tomasello, undervalue the role of social interaction. It explains that because language has social goals as its ultimate purpose, social interactions are the outcome of word learning.

This chapter presents arguments and reviews evidence in support of the hypothesis that in the course of typical word learning, young children actively pursue joint attention because they understand that others' attentional focus gives information about their referential and communicative intentions. It argues that alternative conceptions of the role of joint attention in language, in particular ones that focus on largely passive associative mechanisms, cannot account for the range of experimental data that has been collected with young word learners. Finally, the chapter argues that the conceptual requirements for making inferences about others' communicative intentions need not be very sophisticated and the chapter notes that these skills may be grounded in infants' basic perceptual and neurobiological capacities.

This chapter discusses Linda B. Smith's concern with how associative mechanisms drive word learning and, more importantly, how they allow the child to build up biases that engender additional word learning. It presents Smith and her colleagues' argument that children develop a “shape bias” when they encounter new count nouns and learn that object-based lexical categories are organised by shape. It explains that Smith highlights the role of a priori constraints on word learning.

This chapter examines how children's cognitive, social, and linguistic abilities interact to enable them to analyze action in events and learn novel verbs. It argues that “infants not only are competent in discriminating human actions and object motion but also understand that many different agents are capable of performing the same actions by the beginning of the second year.” However, these achievements are insufficient for verb learning and extension because toddlers must become aware of the intentions of the actor. Verb learning and extension first occur based on a superficial perceptual analysis of how the action looks, followed by learning and extension based more on what the actor intends to do.

A current controversy in the study of word learning is whether it is conceptually easier to learn nouns as compared to verbs early in development. This chapter describes three experiments which address the noun-verb question in different ways. In the first experiment, researchers asked how many times (and on how many days) does a 2-year-old need to hear a word to be able to learn it, and does this differ for nouns and verbs? This second study investigates whether — when nouns and verbs are presented in comparable sentence contexts, controlling the number of exposures, and presenting a dynamic event in both the noun and verb conditions — nouns are easier to learn than are verbs. In Study 3, researchers compared children's ability to learn intransitive and transitive verbs and their ability to understand verbs for self-action as opposed to other action, to determine whether some of these verb and referent types are learned more quickly than are others.

This chapter presents a multifactor view of word learning, opting for a social explanation based in cultural factors. Using a modification of Gillette and Gleitman's human simulation paradigm, researchers asked adult subjects (Western students, Japanese students, and second-generation Japanese students) to guess the words an American mother was saying to her child in the play scenes. They did not specify the form class of the word to be supplied. The general prediction was that Japanese students would focus on actions more than nouns and vice versa for the Western students. They found that all three groups identified more nouns than verbs but that this effect was more pronounced with the Western students. However, there were no differences in the number of correct matches for nouns between the three groups or for the accuracy of the verbs guessed. These results suggest that cultural factors may indeed influence the English-speaking child to learn more nouns than verbs.

This chapter begins by defining “word”. It explains that words are minimal free forms in the languages of the world and are the building blocks of language. It then examines how humans cross the word-learning barrier. It states that the acoustic properties of a word are the first aspect that a child must notice, and that linguistic stimuli appear to be processed in different parts of the brain than are non-linguistic stimuli. It discusses that it is the hierarchical aspect of reference — icon, index, and symbol — that distinguishes human words from animal calls. It argues that symbol acquisition seems to require more than does the acquisition of indices. It provides an overview of the entire study.

This chapter discusses how children may accomplish the difficult task of verb learning, focusing on the integration of multiple language-internal cues to verb forms. It first reviews previous work on multiple-cue integration. It then reports results from novel analyses of corpora of English child-directed speech, pointing to different roles for distributional and phonological cues in the learning of nouns and verbs. Finally, the chapter relates the differential roles of cues to differences in semantic support for nouns and verbs in language-external information, and discusses the possible implications of the results for the understanding of word learning more generally.

We report three eyetracking experiments that examine the learning procedure used by adults as they pair novel words and visually presented referents over a sequence of referentially ambiguous trials. Successful learning under such conditions has been argued to be the product of a learning procedure in which participants provisionally pair each novel word with several possible referents and use a statistical associative learning mechanism to gradually converge on a single mapping across learning instances. We argue here that successful learning in this setting is instead the product of a one-trial procedure in which a single hypothesized word-referent pairing is retained across learning instances, abandoned only if the subsequent instance fails to confirm the pairing. We provide experimental evidence for this propose-but-verify learning procedure via three experiments in which adult participants attempted to learn the meanings of nonce words cross-situationally under varying degrees of referential uncertainty.

An introduction to the notion of modularity of mind and an argument as to why only formal semantic theories are compatible with the claim that semantic comprehension is the product of a (Fodorian) modular system. This chapter also looks at some initial challenges to formal semantics stemming from the apparent place of pragmatic reasoning in our grasp of meaning. These include arguments concerning the nature of speech acts, the analysis of implicatures, word learning, and ambiguity.