Meaning in the objects

In this paper, I am arguing that objects being present in the external situation ground the linguistic meaning. Furthermore, I will show that the nature of objects can change not only linguistic but also gestural behavior. Instead of simply excluding materialistic factors, I therefore suggest a careful inclusion of object knowledge into experimental conditions. I also argue that we have to calculate the risk of eliminating important components for children’s reasoning, when we adapt this method to studies on children’s language development. Children are good learners because they are biased towards certain solutions (Dabrowska 2005). For this reason, it seems to be problematic to create novel or abstract situations in which children cannot draw from their nonlinguistic experiences.

Published online: 14 April 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.175.08roh