Article published In:
PragmaticsVol. 10:4 (2000) ► pp.401–413
The social-pragmatic theory of word learning
Some researchers have tried to explain early word learning via garden-variety learning processes and others by invoking linguistically specific “constraints” that help children to narrow down the referential possibilities. The social-pragmatic approach to word learning argues that children do not need specifically linguistic constraints to learn words, but rather what they need are flexible and powerful social-cognitive skills that allow them to understand the communicative intentions of others in a wide variety of interactive situations. A series of seven word learning studies demonstrate something of the range of communicative situations in which children can learn new words. These situations include many non-ostensive contexts in which no one is intentionally teaching the child a new word and the intended referent is not perceptually present at the time of the new word’s introduction. Language acquisition in general, and word learning in particular, is best seen as a special case of cultural learning in which children attempt to discern adults’ intentions toward their intentions toward things in the world.
Keywords: Word Learning, Pragmatics, Lexical Development, Intentionality
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
References
Akhtar, N., M. Carpenter, and M. Tomasello
(1996) The role of discourse novelty in children’s early word learning. Child Development 671: 635–45. 
Akhtar, N., and M. Tomasello
(1996) Twenty-four month old children learn words for absent objects and actions. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 141: 79–93.
Baldwin, D.
(1991) Infants’ contributions to the achievement of joint referenceC. hild Development 621: 875–90.
(1993) Infants’ ability to consult the speaker for clues to word reference. Journal of Child Language 201: 395–418.
Bloom, P.
(2000) How children learn the meanings of words. Cambrdige, Mass.: MIT Press.
Brown
(1973) A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Brown, P.
(in press) The conversational context for language acquisition: A Tzeltal (Mayan) case study. To appear in M. Bowerman & S. Levinson (eds.) Language acquisition and conceptual development Cambridge Cambridge University Press
Bruner, J.
(1983) Child’s talk. New York: Norton.
Carpenter, M., N. Akhtar, and M. Tomasello
(1998) Fourteen-through 18 month-old infants differentially imitate intentional and accidental actions. Infant Behavior and Development 21.2: 315–330.
Carpenter, M., K. Nagell, and M. Tomasello
(1998) Social cognition, joint attention, and communicative competence from 9 to 15 months of age. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Volume 63.
Diesendruck, G., L. Markson, N. Akhtar, and A. Reudor
(in press) Two-year-olds’ sensitivity to speakers’ intent: An alternative account of Samuelson and Smith. Child Development.
Gleitman, L.
(1990) The structural sources of verb meaning. Language Acquisition 11: 3–55.
Haith, M., and J. Benson
(1997) Infant cognition. In D. Kuhn & R. Siegler (eds.), Handbook of Child Psychology, Volume 2. New York: Wiley.
Markman, E.
(1989) Categorization and naming in children. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
(1992) Constraints on word learning: Speculations about their nature, origins, and word specificity. In M. Gunnar & M. Maratsos (eds), Modularity and constraints in language and cognition. Hillsdale, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Moore, C., M. Angelopoulos, and P. Bennett
(1999) Word learning in the context of referential and salience cues. Developmental Psychology 351: 60–68.
Nelson, K.
Pinker, S.
(1999) Words and rules: The ingredients of language. New York: Basic Books.
Quine, W.
(1960) Word and object. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Samuelson, L., and L. Smith
(1998) Memory and attention make smart word learning: An alternative account of Akhtar, Carpenter, and Tomasello. Child Development 691: 94–104.
Smith, L.
(2000) Learning how to learn words: An associative crane. In R. Golinkoff & K. Hirsh-Pasek (eds.), Becoming a word learne: A debate on lexical acquisition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tomasello, M.
(1987) Learning to use prepositions: A case study. Journal of Child Language 141: 79–98.
(1992a) The social bases of language acquisition. Social Development 1.1: 67–87.
(1992b) First Verbs: A Case Study of Early Grammatical Development. Cambridge University Press.
(1995a) Joint attention as social cognition. In C. Moore & P. Dunham (eds.), Joint attention: Its origins and role in development. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 103–130.
(1995b) Pragmatic contexts for early verb learning. In M. Tomasello & W. Merriman (eds.), Beyond Names for Things: Young Children’s Acquisition of Verbs. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
(ed.) (1998) The new psychology of language: Cognitive and functional approaches to language structure. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. BoP
(1999) The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
(2000) Perceiving intentions and learning words in the second year of life. To appear in M. Bowerman & S. Levinson (eds.), Language acquisition and conceptual development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 132–158.
(ed.) (in press) The new psychology of language: Cognitive and functional approaches to language structure, Volume 2 Hillsdale, NJ Lawrence Erlbaum
Tomasello, M., and N. Akhtar
(1995) Two-year-olds use pragmatic cues to differentiate reference to objects and actions. Cognitive Development 101: 201–224.
Tomasello, M., and M. Barton
(1994) Learning words in non-ostensive contexts. Developmental Psychology 301: 639–650. Tomasello & Brooks, in Press.
Tomasello, M., and A. Kruger
(1992) Joint attention on actions: Acquiring verbs in ostensive and non-ostensive contexts. Journal of Child Language 191: 311–334.
Tomasello, M., R. Strosberg, and N. Akhtar
(1996) Eighteen-month-old children learn words in non-ostensive contexts. Journal of Child Language 221: 1–20.
Wittgenstein, L.
(1953) Philosophical investigations. New York: MacMillan.
Cited by
Cited by 68 other publications
Belteki, Zsofia, Carlijn van den Boomen & Caroline Junge
2022. Face-to-face contact during infancy: How the development of gaze to faces feeds into infants’ vocabulary outcomes. Frontiers in Psychology 13 
Bernicot, Josie & Virginie Laval
2004. Speech Acts in Children: the Example of Promises. In Experimental Pragmatics, ► pp. 207 ff.
Bernicot, Josie, Virginie Laval & Stéphanie Chaminaud
2007. Nonliteral language forms in children: In what order are they acquired in pragmatics and metapragmatics?. Journal of Pragmatics 39:12 ► pp. 2115 ff.
Cauvet, Elodie, Rita Limissuri, Severine Millotte, Katrin Skoruppa, Dominique Cabrol & Anne Christophe
2014. Function Words Constrain On-Line Recognition of Verbs and Nouns in French 18-Month-Olds. Language Learning and Development 10:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Chaminaud, Stéphanie, Virginie Laval & Josie Bernicot
2006. Pragmatique et compréhension du langage chez l’enfant : une étude des formes non littérales avec un paradigme informatisé. L’Année psychologique 106:04 ► pp. 491 ff.
Clarke, Kaitlyn A
2019. A review of language regression in autism spectrum disorder and the role of language theories: Towards explanation. Autism & Developmental Language Impairments 4 ► pp. 239694151988922 ff.
Conica, Mirela, Elizabeth Nixon & Jean Quigley
2020. Fathers’ but not Mothers’ Repetition of Children’s Utterances at Age Two is Associated with Child Vocabulary at Age Four. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 191 ► pp. 104738 ff.
Doherty, Martin J. & Josef Perner
2020. Mental files: Developmental integration of dual naming and theory of mind. Developmental Review 56 ► pp. 100909 ff.
Doi, Hirokazu
2020. Social Scaffolding of Vocal and Language Development. In The Origins of Language Revisited, ► pp. 115 ff.
Ellis, Katherine, Philippa Lewington, Laurie Powis, Chris Oliver, Jane Waite, Mary Heald, Ian Apperly, Priya Sandhu & Hayley Crawford
2020. Scaling of Early Social Cognitive Skills in Typically Developing Infants and Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 50:11 ► pp. 3988 ff.
Fellinger, Johannes, Magdalena Dall & Daniel Holzinger
2021. Therapeutic living communities for adults who are deaf and have intellectual disabilities: A conceptual model linking social communication and mental health. International Journal of Developmental Disabilities 67:5 ► pp. 391 ff.
Filippi, Piera, Bruno Gingras & W. Tecumseh Fitch
2014. Pitch enhancement facilitates word learning across visual contexts. Frontiers in Psychology 5
Förster, Frank & Kaspar Althoefer
2022. Attribution of autonomy and its role in robotic language acquisition. AI & SOCIETY 37:2 ► pp. 605 ff.
Ghimenton, Anna
2017. Chapter 8. Socializing language choices. In Acquiring Sociolinguistic Variation [Studies in Language Variation, 20], ► pp. 213 ff.
Golinkoff, Roberta Michnick, Weiyi Ma, Lulu Song & Kathy Hirsh-Pasek
2013. Twenty-Five Years Using the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm to Study Language Acquisition. Perspectives on Psychological Science 8:3 ► pp. 316 ff.
Gollek, Cornelia & Martin J. Doherty
2016. Metacognitive developments in word learning: Mutual exclusivity and theory of mind. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 148 ► pp. 51 ff.
Grassmann, Susanne & Michael Tomasello
2010. Young children follow pointing over words in interpreting acts of reference. Developmental Science 13:1 ► pp. 252 ff.
Gray, Shelley, Hope Lancaster, Mary Alt, Tiffany P. Hogan, Samuel Green, Roy Levy & Nelson Cowan
2020. The Structure of Word Learning in Young School-Age Children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 63:5 ► pp. 1446 ff.
Henning, Kyle J. & William E. Merriman
2019. The Disambiguation Prediction Effect. Journal of Cognition and Development 20:3 ► pp. 334 ff.
Hollich, George
2010. Early Language. In The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Infant Development, ► pp. 426 ff.
Holzinger, Daniel, Johannes Hofer, Magdalena Dall & Johannes Fellinger
2022. Multidimensional Family-Centred Early Intervention in Children with Hearing Loss: A Conceptual Model. Journal of Clinical Medicine 11:6 ► pp. 1548 ff.
Hsieh, Shelley Ching-Yu & Chun-Chieh Natalie Hsu
2010. Idiom Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 39:6 ► pp. 505 ff.
Hughes, K. R., Abigail L. Hogan, Jane E. Roberts & Jessica Klusek
2019. Gesture Frequency and Function in Infants With Fragile X Syndrome and Infant Siblings of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 62:7 ► pp. 2386 ff.
Kalashnikova, Marina, Karen Mattock & Padraic Monaghan
2014. Disambiguation of novel labels and referential facts: A developmental perspective. First Language 34:2 ► pp. 125 ff.
Kelly, Barbara, Gillian Wigglesworth, Rachel Nordlinger & Joseph Blythe
2014. The Acquisition of Polysynthetic Languages. Language and Linguistics Compass 8:2 ► pp. 51 ff.
Kemény, Ferenc & Ágnes Lukács
2021. The Role of Statistical Learning and Verbal Short-Term Memory in Impaired and Typical Lexical Development. Frontiers in Communication 6
Knott, Alistair
2014. How Infants Learn Word Meanings and Propositional Attitudes: A Neural Network Model. In Communicative Action, ► pp. 107 ff.
KOBAYASHI, Harumi, Tetsuya YASUDA & Ulf LISZKOWSKI
2023. Marked pointing facilitates learning part names: A test of lexical constraint versus social pragmatic accounts of word learning. Journal of Child Language 50:2 ► pp. 296 ff.
Kretch, Kari S., Emily C. Marcinowski, Lin‐Ya Hsu, Natalie A. Koziol, Regina T. Harbourne, Michele A. Lobo & Stacey C. Dusing
2023. Opportunities for learning and social interaction in infant sitting: Effects of sitting support, sitting skill, and gross motor delay. Developmental Science 26:3
Laval, Virginie
2003. Idiom comprehension and metapragmatic knowledge in French children. Journal of Pragmatics 35:5 ► pp. 723 ff.
Laval, Virginie & Josie Bernicot
2022.
“Tu es dans la lune”
. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 399 ff.
Lee, Crystal & Casey Lew‐Williams
2023. The dynamic functions of social cues during children's word learning. Infant and Child Development 32:1
Mohammed, Hassnaa Othman & Nesreen Fathi Mahmoud
2020. The early communicative skills among a sample of Egyptian infants and toddlers. The Egyptian Journal of Otolaryngology 36:1
O'Donnell, Matthew Brook, Emily B. Falk & Matthew D. Lieberman
2015. Social in, Social out: How the Brain Responds to Social Language with More Social Language. Communication Monographs 82:1 ► pp. 31 ff.
O'Fallon, Maura, Katie Von Holzen & Rochelle S. Newman
2020. Preschoolers' Word-Learning During Storybook Reading Interactions: Comparing Repeated and Elaborated Input. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 63:3 ► pp. 814 ff.
O'Grady, William
2005. How Children Learn Language,
Park, Youjeong & Jinwook Kim
2015. How Children Acquire Language-specific Ways of Partitioning Space: Creating a Semantic Category System Using Semantic Primitives. Child Studies in Asia-Pacific Contexts 5:1 ► pp. 21 ff.
Perpiñà Martí, Georgina, Francesc Sidera Caballero & Elisabet Serrat Sellabona
2020. Does Emotional Intelligence Have an Impact on Linguistic Competences? A Primary Education Study. Sustainability 12:24 ► pp. 10474 ff.
Pham, Theresa, Joel Hosung Kang, Alisha Johnson & Lisa M. D. Archibald
2020. Feature-focusing constraints on implicit learning of function word and meaning associations. Applied Psycholinguistics 41:2 ► pp. 401 ff.
Portilla, Claudia, Maribel Peró & Ana Teberosky
2009. La doble denominación de la sinonimia en el contexto de lo escrito. Infancia y Aprendizaje 32:3 ► pp. 277 ff.
Ramey, Christopher H., Evangelia G. Chrysikou & Jamie Reilly
2013. Snapshots of Children's Changing Biases During Language Development: Differential Weighting of Perceptual and Linguistic Factors Predicts Noun Age of Acquisition. Journal of Cognition and Development 14:4 ► pp. 573 ff.
RONFARD, Samuel, Ran WEI & Meredith L. ROWE
2022. Exploring the Linguistic, Cognitive, and Social Skills Underlying Lexical Processing Efficiency as Measured by the Looking-while-Listening Paradigm. Journal of Child Language 49:2 ► pp. 302 ff.
Räsänen, Okko
2012. Computational modeling of phonetic and lexical learning in early language acquisition: Existing models and future directions. Speech Communication 54:9 ► pp. 975 ff.
Schaden, Gerhard
2017. Appropriate Pragmatic Behaviour: Response to Foster-Cohen and Wong. In Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line [Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, 11], ► pp. 183 ff.
Senent-Capuz, Nuria, Inmaculada Baixauli-Fortea & Carmen Moret-Tatay
2021. Parent-Implemented Hanen Program It Takes Two to Talk®: An Exploratory Study in Spain. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18:15 ► pp. 8214 ff.
Silvey, Catriona, Simon Kirby & Kenny Smith
2015. Word Meanings Evolve to Selectively Preserve Distinctions on Salient Dimensions. Cognitive Science 39:1 ► pp. 212 ff.
Stallworthy, Isabella C., Daniel Berry, Savannah Davis, Jason J. Wolff, Catherine A. Burrows, Meghan R. Swanson, Rebecca L. Grzadzinski, Kelly Botteron, Stephen R. Dager, Annette M. Estes, Robert T. Schultz, Joseph Piven, Jed T. Elison, John R. Pruett & Natasha Marrus
2023. Quantifying latent social motivation and its associations with joint attention and language in infants at high and low likelihood for autism spectrum disorder. Developmental Science 26:3
Tamis‐LeMonda, Catherine S., Stephanie Custode, Yana Kuchirko, Kelly Escobar & Tiffany Lo
2019. Routine Language: Speech Directed to Infants During Home Activities. Child Development 90:6 ► pp. 2135 ff.
Taylor, Lauren J., Tony Charman, Patricia Howlin, Vicky Slonims & Jonathan Green
2020. Brief Report: Associations Between Preverbal Social Communication Skills, Language and Symptom Severity in Children with Autism: An Investigation Using the Early Sociocognitive Battery. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 50:4 ► pp. 1434 ff.
Thomas, James & Simon Kirby
2018. Self domestication and the evolution of language. Biology & Philosophy 33:1-2
Tippenhauer, Nicholas & Megan M. Saylor
2019. Effects of context variability on 2-year-olds’ fact and word learning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 179 ► pp. 248 ff.
Verga, Laura, Emmanuel Bigand & Sonja A. Kotz
2015. Play along: effects of music and social interaction on word learning. Frontiers in Psychology 6
Verga, Laura & Sonja A. Kotz
2017. Help me if I can't: Social interaction effects in adult contextual word learning. Cognition 168 ► pp. 76 ff.
Verga, Laura & Sonja A. Kotz
2019. Spatial attention underpins social word learning in the right fronto-parietal network. NeuroImage 195 ► pp. 165 ff.
Verga, Laura & Sonja A. Kotz
2019. Putting language back into ecological communication contexts. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 34:4 ► pp. 536 ff.
Voiklis, John & James E. Corter
2012. Conventional Wisdom: Negotiating Conventions of Reference Enhances Category Learning. Cognitive Science 36:4 ► pp. 607 ff.
Weber, Chantal, Christoph Weber, Johannes Fellinger & Daniel Holzinger
2021. Development of a Social Communication Questionnaire (QSC-ID) for People With Intellectual Disability in a Deaf Sample: A Pilot and Feasibility Study. Frontiers in Psychiatry 12
Wildt, Eugenia, Katharina J. Rohlfing & Ingrid Scharlau
2019. The Role of Saliency in Learning First Words. Frontiers in Psychology 10
Woensdregt, Marieke, Chris Cummins & Kenny Smith
2021. A computational model of the cultural co-evolution of language and mindreading. Synthese 199:1-2 ► pp. 1347 ff.
Yildiz, Mustafa
2020. Conflicting Nature of Social-Pragmatic Cues with Mutual Exclusivity Regarding Three-Year-Olds’ Label-Referent Mappings. Psychology of Language and Communication 24:1 ► pp. 124 ff.
Yoshida, Hanako & Linda B. Smith
2008. What's in View for Toddlers? Using a Head Camera to Study Visual Experience. Infancy 13:3 ► pp. 229 ff.
Yu, Chen & Linda B. Smith
2017. Multiple Sensory‐Motor Pathways Lead to Coordinated Visual Attention. Cognitive Science 41:S1 ► pp. 5 ff.
Yu, Chen & Linda B. Smith
2016. The Social Origins of Sustained Attention in One-Year-Old Human Infants. Current Biology 26:9 ► pp. 1235 ff.
Yu, Chen, Sumarga H. Suanda & Linda B. Smith
2019. Infant sustained attention but not joint attention to objects at 9 months predicts vocabulary at 12 and 15 months. Developmental Science 22:1 ► pp. e12735 ff.
Yurovsky, Daniel
2018. A communicative approach to early word learning. New Ideas in Psychology 50 ► pp. 73 ff.
Yurovsky, Daniel & Michael C. Frank
2017. Beyond naïve cue combination: salience and social cues in early word learning. Developmental Science 20:2 ► pp. e12349 ff.
Álvarez, Carlos G., Felipe Torres Morales, Laura C. Culcay & Javiera Amapola Bascuñán Vidal
2021. Cavernomas cerebrales en la infancia y desarrollo atípico de la comunicación y el lenguaje. Revista de Investigación en Logopedia 11:2 ► pp. e70738 ff.
[no author supplied]
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 may 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.