Article published in:
Pragmatic Development in First Language Acquisition
Edited by Danielle Matthews
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 10] 2014
► pp. 139–160

The pragmatics of word learning

Children use and integrate a variety of information when learning novel words. Most strikingly, children are skillful in drawing inferences about speakers’ intentions. This chapter reviews the current state of affairs regarding the wide variety of pragmatic information that children employ in word learning. Current debates on whether seemingly pragmatic phenomena in word learning should be explained by simpler processes are addressed throughout the chapter. Suggestions for future research directions are made. Finally, I suggest that in order to acknowledge the role that pragmatic information plays in word learning, the field needs to come to an agreement on what it is that children acquire in word learning: word-object/concept-associations or means to communicate and direct other’s attention to certain objects?
Published online: 26 June 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.10.09gra
References
Akhtar, N.
(2002) Relevance and early word learning. Journal of Child Language , 29, 677–686. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Akhtar, N., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M.
(1996) The role of discourse novelty in early word learning. Child Development , 67, 635–645. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Akhtar, N. & Tomasello, M.
(1996) Two-year-olds learn words for absent objects and actions. British Journal of Developmental Psychology , 14, 79–93. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Akhtar, N., & Tomasello, M.
(2000) The social nature of words and word learning. In R.M. Golinkoff & K. Hirsh-Pasek (Eds.), Becoming a Word Learner: A Debate on Lexical Acquisition (pp. 115–135). Oxford: OUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Aust, U., Range, F., Steurer, M., & Huber, L.
(2008) Inferential reasoning by exclusion in pigeons, dogs, and humans. Animal Cognition , 11, 587–597. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bakeman, R., & Adamson, L.B.
(1984) Coordinating attention to people and objects in mother-infant and peer-infant interaction. Child Development , 55, 1278–1289. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Baldwin, D.A.
(1991) Infants’ contribution to the achievement of joint reference. Child Development , 62, 875. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(1993) Infants ability to consult the speaker for clues to word reference. Journal of Child Language , 20, 395–418. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Baldwin, D.A., Markman, E.M., Bill, B., Desjardins, R.N., Irwin, J.M., & Tidball, G.
(1996) Infants’ reliance on a social criterion for establishing word-object relations. Child Development , 67, 3135–3153. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bannard, C., & Tomasello, M.
(2012) Can we dissociate contingency learning from social learning in word acquisition by 24-month-olds? PLoS ONE , 7(11), e49881. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S., Baldwin, D.A., & Crowson, M.
(1997) Do children with autism use the speaker’s direction of gaze strategy to crack the code of language? Child Development , 68, 48–57. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bergelson, E., & Swingley, D.
(2012) At 6–9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 109, 3253–3258. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Berman, J.M.J., Graham, S.A., Callaway, D., & Chambers, C.G.
(2013) Preschoolers use emotion in speech to learn new words. Child Development , 84(5), 1791–1805. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Birch, S.A.J., S.A. Vauthier, & P. Bloom
2008 Three- and four-year-olds spontaneously use others’ past performance to guide their learning. Cognition , 107, 1018–1034. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Booth, A.E., McGregor, K.K., & Rohlfing, K.J.
(2008) Socio-pragmatics and attention: Contributions to gesturally guided word learning in toddlers. Language Learning and Development , 4, 179–202. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Brand, R.J.
(2000) Learning novel nouns: Children use mulitple cues. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development , 65, 41–61. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Briganti, A.M., & Cohen, L.B.
(2011) Examining the role of social cues in early word learning. Infant Behavior and Development , 34, 211–214. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Brooks, R., & Meltzoff, A.N.
(2008) Infant gaze following and pointing predict accelerated vocabulary growth through two years of age: A longitudinal, growth curve modeling study. Journal of Child Language , 35(1), 207–220. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Byers-Heinlein, K., & Werker, J.F.
(2009) Monolingual, bilingual, trilingual: Infants’ language experience influences the development of a word-learning heuristic. Developmental Science , 12, 815–823. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Capone, N.C.
(2012) Can semantic enrichment lead to naming in a word extension task? American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology , 21, 279–292. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Capone, N.C., & McGregor, K.K.
(2005) The effect of semantic representation on toddlers’ word retrieval. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research , 48, 1468–1480. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Carpenter, M., Call, J., & Tomasello, M.
(2002) A new false belief test for 36-month-olds. British Journal of Developmental Psychology , 20(3), 393–420. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Clark, E.V.
(1990) On the pragmatics of contrast. Journal of Child Language , 17, 417–431. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Clark, E.V., & Estigarribia, B.
(2011) Using speech and gesture to introduce new objects to young children. Gesture , 11, 1–23. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Clark, E.V., & Grossman, J.B.
(1998) Pragmatic directions and children’s word learning. Journal of Child Language , 25, 1–18. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Clark, E.V.C. & Wong, A.D.
(2002) Pragmatic directions about language use: Offers of words and relations. Language in Society , 31(2), 181–212.Google Scholar
de Marchena, A., Eigsti, I.-M., Worek, A., Ono, K.E., & Snedeker, J.
(2011) Mutual exclusivity in autism spectrum disorders: Testing the pragmatic hypothesis. Cognition , 119, 96–113. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Diesendruck, G.
(2005) The principles of conventionality and contrast in word learning: An empirical examination. Developmental Psychology , 41, 451–463. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Diesendruck, G., & Markson, L.
(2001) Children’s avoidance of lexical overlap: A pragmatic account. Developmental Psychology , 37, 630–641. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Diesendruck, G., Carmel, N., & Markson, L.
(2010) Children’s sensitivity to the conventionality of sources. Child Development , 81, 652–668. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Diesendruck, G., Markson, L., Akhtar, N., & Reudor, A.
(2004) Two-year-olds’ sensitivity to speakers’ intent: An alternative account of Samuelson and Smith. Developmental Science , 7, 33–41. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Diesendruck, G. & Patael, S.
in press). The pragmatics of disambiguation. In T. Matsui (Ed.) Pragmatics and Theory of Mind Amsterdam John Benjamins.
Gathercole, V.C.
(1989) Contrast: A semantic constraint? Journal of Child Language , 16, 685–702. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gliga, T., & Csibra, G.
(2009) One-year-old infants appreciate the referential nature of deictic gestures and words. Psychological Science , 20, 347–353. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gogate, L.J., & Hollich, G.
(2010) Invariance detection within an interactive system: A perceptual gateway to language development. Psychological Review , 117, 496–516. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Golinkoff, R., & Hirsh-Pasek, K.
(2006) Baby wordsmith. From associationist to social sophisticate. Current Directions in Psychological Science , 15, 30–33. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Golinkoff, R.M., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Bailey, L.M. & Wenger, N.R.
(1992) Young children and adults use lexical principles to learn new nouns. Developmental Psychology , 28, 99–108. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Golinkoff, R.M., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Bloom, L., Smith, L., Woodward, A., & Akhtar, N.
., et al (Eds.) (2000)  Becoming a Word Learner . Oxford: OUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Golinkoff, R., Mervis, C.B., & Hirsh-Pasek, K.
(1994) Early object labels – the case for a developmental lexical principles framework. Journal of Child Language , 21, 125–155. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Goodrich, W., & Hudson Kam, C.L.
(2009) Co-speech gesture as input in verb learning. Developmental Science , 12, 81–87. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Graham, S.A., & Kilbreath, C.S.
(2007) It’s a sign of the kind: Gestures and words guide infants’ inductive inferences. Developmental Psychology , 43, 1111–1123. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Graham, S.A., Nilsen, E.S., Collins, S., & Olineck, K.
(2010) The role of gaze direction and mutual exclusivity in guiding 24-month-olds’ word mappings. British Journal of Developmental Psychology , 28, 449–465. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Grassmann, S.
(2013) Word learning by exclusion: The role of specific naming expectations. In F. Liedtke & C. Schulze, Beyond the Words. Content, Context, and Inference (pp. 67–89). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Grassmann, S., & Tomasello, M.
(2007) Two-year-olds use primary sentence accent to learn new words. Journal of Child Language , 34, 677. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2009) Young children follow pointing over words in interpreting acts of reference. Developmental Science , 13, 252–263. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2012) Gesture juxtaposition and sentence accent in part term learning. Poster presented at the ISSBD, Edmonton, Canada.Google Scholar
Grassmann, S., Lenke, J., & Tomasello, M.
(2011) Children’s understanding of anaphoric reference. Paper presented at theIASCL Triennial Meeting, Montreal, Canada.
Grassmann, S., Magister, C., & Tomasello, M.
(2011) What children do when pointing and naming conflict. Paper presented at theSRCD Biennial Meeting, Montreal, Canada.
Grassmann, S., Schreiner, M., & Tomasello, M.
(2011) The pragmatics of exclusion: Children exclude familiar objects as referents of applicable known super-ordinate terms. Paper presented at theXPrag Conference, Barcelona, Spain.
Grassmann, S., Stracke, M., & Tomasello, M.
(2009) Two-year-olds exclude novel objects as potential referents of novel words based on pragmatics. Cognition , 112, 488–493. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hall, D.G., & Waxman, S.R.
(Eds.) (2004)  Weaving a Lexicon . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hall, D.G., Williams, S.G., & Bélanger, J.
(2010) Learning Count Nouns and Adjectives: Understanding the Contributions of Lexical Form Class and Social-Pragmatic Cues. Journal of Cognition and Development, 11(1), 86–120. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hansen, M.B., & Markman, E.M.
(2009) Children’s use of mutual exclusivity to learn labels for parts of objects. Developmental psychology, 45, 592–6. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hennon, E., Chung, H.L., & Brown, E.
(2000) What does it take for 12-month-olds to learn a word? Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development , 65, CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hirotani, M., Stets, M., Striano, T., & Friederici, A.D.
(2009) Joint attention helps infants learn new words: Event-related potential evidence. NeuroReport , 20, 600–605. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hollich, G.J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R.M., Brand, R.J., Brown, E., Chung, H.L. & Hennon, E.
(2000) Breaking the language barrier: An emergentist coalition model for the origins of word learning. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development , 65.
Horst, J.S., Samuelson, L.K., Kucker, S.C., & McMurray, B.
(2011) What’s new? Children prefer novelty in referent selection. Cognition , 118(2), 234–244. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Houston-Price, C., Caloghiris, Z., & Raviglione, E.
(2010) Language experience shapes the development of the mutual exclusivity bias. Infancy , 15, 125–150. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Houston-Price, C., Plunkett, K., & Duffy, H.
(2006) The use of social and salience cues in early word learning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology , 95, 27–55. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Houston-Price, C., Goddard, K., Séclier, C., Grant, S.C., Reid, C.J.B., Boyden, L.E., & Williams, R.
(2011) Tracking speakers’ false beliefs: Is theory of mind available earlier for word learning? Developmental Science , 14, 623–634. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Iverson, J.M., Capirci, O., Longobardi, E., & Cristina, Caselli M.
(1999) Gesturing in mother-child interactions. Cognitive Development , 14, 57–75. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jaswal, V.K., & Hansen, M.B.
(2006) Learning words: Children disregard some pragmatic information that conflicts with mutual exclusivity. Developmental Science , 9, 158–165. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jaswal, V.K.
(2010) Explaining the disambiguation effect: Don’t exclude mutual exclusivity. Journal of Child Language, 37, 95–113. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jaswal, V.K., & Neely, L.A.
2006 Adults don’t always know best: Preschoolers use past reliability over age when learning new words. Psychological Science , 17, 757–758. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kaminski, J., Call, J., & Fischer, J.
(2004) Word learning in a domestic dog: Evidence for fast mapping. Science , 304, 1682–1683. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kendon, A.
(1994) Do gestures communicate? A review. Research on Language and Social Interaction , 27, 175–200. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kidd, C., White, K.S., & Aslin, R.N.
(2011) Toddlers use speech disfluencies to predict speakers’ referential intentions. Developmental Science , 14, 925–934. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kobayashi, H.
(1998) How 2-year-old children learn novel part names of unfamiliar objects. Cognition , 68, B41–B51. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Koenig, M.A., & Harris, P.L.
(2005) Preschoolers mistrust ignorant and inaccurate speakers. Child Development , 76, 1261–77. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Koenig, M.A., & Woodward, A.L.
(2010) Sensitivity of 24-month-olds to the prior inaccuracy of the source: Possible mechanisms. Developmental Psychology , 46, 815–826. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Koenig, M., & Woodward, A.L.
(2011) Toddlers learn words in a foreign language: The role of native vocabulary knowledge. Journal of Child Language , 39, 322–337. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kovács, Á.M., Téglás, E. & Endress, A.D.
(2010) The social sense: Susceptibility to others’ beliefs in human infants and adults. Science , 330, 1830–1834. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Liebal, K., Behne, T., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M.
(2009) Infants use shared experience to interpret pointing gestures. Developmental Science , 12, 264–271. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Luyster, R., & Lord, C.
(2009) Word learning in children with autism spectrum disorders. Developmental Psychology , 45, 1774–1786. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mather, E., & Plunkett, K.
(2010) Novel labels support ten-month-olds’ attention to novel objects. In K. Franich, K.M. Iserman, & L.L. Keil (Eds.) Proceedings of the 34th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 303–314). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Markman, E.M.
(1989)  Categorization and Naming in Children: Problems of Induction . ­Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Markman, E.M., & Wachtel, G.F.
(1988) Children’s use of mutual exclusivity to constrain the meanings of words. Cognitive Psychology , 20, 121–157. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mathern, E., & Plunkett, K.
(2012) The role of novelty in early word learning. Cognitive science , 36, 1157–77. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
McIlvane, W.J., & Stoddard, T.
(1981) Acquisition of matching-to-sample performances in severe retardation: learning by exclusion. Journal of mental Deficiency Research , 25, 33–48.Google Scholar
McNeill, D.
(1992)  Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought . Chicago IL: ­University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Merriman, W.E., & Bowman, L.L.
(1989) The mutual exclusivity bias in children’s word learning. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development , 54(serial no. 220). CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Moll, H., Koring, C., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M.
(2006) Infants determine others’ focus of attention by pragmatics and exclusion. Journal of Cognition and Development , 7, 411–430. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Moore, C., Angelopoulos, M., & Bennett, P.
(1999) Word learning in the context of referential and salience cues. Developmental Psychology , 35, 60–68. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Namy, L.L., & Waxman, S.R.
(1998) Words and gestures: Infants’ interpretations of different forms of symbolic reference. Child Development , 69, 295–308. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, K.
(1985)  Making Sense. The Acquisition of Shared Meaning . New York, NY: Academic press.Google Scholar
Nilsen, E.S., Graham, S.A., & Pettigrew, T.
(2008) Preschoolers’ word mapping: The interplay between labelling context and specificity of speaker information. Journal of Child Language , 36, 673. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nurmsoo, E., & Bloom, P.
(2008) Preschoolers’ perspective taking in word learning: Do they blindly follow eye gaze? Psychological Science , 19, 211–215. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
O’Hanlon, C.G., & Roberson, D.
(2007) What constrains children’s learning of novel shape terms? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology , 97, 138–148. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
O’Neill, D.K., Topolovec, J., & Stern-Cavalcante, W.
(2002) Feeling sponginess: The importance of descriptive gestures in 2- and 3-year-old children’s acquisition of adjectives. Journal of Cognition and Development , 3, 243–277. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pepperberg, I.M., & Wilcox, S.E.
(2000) Evidence for a form of mutual exclusivity during label acquisition by grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus)? Journal of Comparative Psychology , 114, 219–231. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Preissler, M.A., & Carey, S.
(2005) The role of inferences about referential intent in word learning: Evidence from autism. Cognition , 97, B13–B23. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pruden, S.M., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R.M., & Hennon, E.A.
(2006) The birth of words: Ten-month-olds learn words through perceptual salience. Child Development , 77, 266–280. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Puccini, D. & Liszkowski, U.
(2012) 15-month-old infants fast map words but not representational gestures of multimodal labels. Front. Psychology , 3. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sabbagh, M.A., & Baldwin, D.A.
(2001) Learning words from knowledgeable versus ignorant speakers: Links between preschoolers’ theory of mind and semantic development. Child Development , 72, 1054–1070. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sabbagh, M.A., & Shafman, D.
(2009) How children block learning from ignorant speakers. Cognition , 112, 415–22. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Samuelson, L.K., & Smith, L.B.
(1998) Memory and attention make smart word learning: An alternative account of Akhtar, Carpenter, and Tomasello. Child Development , 69, 94–104. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Saylor, M., & Troseth, G.
(2006) Preschoolers use information about speakers’ desires to learn words. Cognitive Development , 21, 214–231. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Saylor, M.M., Sabbagh, M.A., & Baldwin, D.A.
(2002) Children use whole-part juxtaposition as a pragmatic cue to word meaning. Developmental Psychology , 38, 993–1003. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Saylor, M.M., Sabbagh, M.A., Fortuna, A., & Troseth, G.
(2009) Preschoolers use speakers’ preferences to learn words. Cognitive Development , 24, 125–132. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Scofield, J., & Behrend, D.A.
(2007) Two-year-olds differentially disambiguate novel words and facts. Journal of Child Language , 34, 875–889. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2008 Learning words from reliable and unreliable speakers. Cognitive Development , 23, 278–290. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Smith, L.
(2000) Learning how to learn words: An associative crane. In R.M. Golinkoff, K. Hirsh-Pasek, L. Bloom, L.B. Smith, A.L. Woodard, N. Akhtar, M. Tomasello, & G. ­Hollich (Eds.), Becoming a Word Learner: A Debate on Lexical Acquisition (pp. 51–80). Oxford: OUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Smith, L.B.
(2005) Action alters shape categories. Cognitive Science , 29, 665–679. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sobel, D.M., & Corriveau, K.H.
(2010) Children monitor individuals’ expertise for word learning. Child Development , 81, 669–679. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sobel, D.M., Sedivy, J., Buchanan, D.W., & Hennessy, R.
(2011) Speaker reliability in preschoolers’ inferences about the meanings of novel words. Journal of Child Language , 39, 90–104. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, L.A., & Massaro, D.W.
(1986) Evaluation and integration of speech and pointing gestures during referential understanding. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology , 42, 144–168. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(1994) Children’s integration of speech and pointing gestures in comprehension. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology , 57, 327–354. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M.
(2003)  Constructing a Language: A Usage-based Theory of Language Acquisition . Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M., & Akhtar, N.
(1995) Two-year-olds use pragmatic cues to differentiate reference to objects and actions. Cognitive Development , 10, 201–224. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M., & Barton, M.E.
(1994) Learning words in nonostensive contexts. Developmental Psychology , 30, 639–650. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M., & Farrar, J.M.
(1986) Joint attention and early language. Child Development , 57, 1454–1463. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M. & Haberl, K.
(2003) Understanding attention: 12- and 18-month-olds know what’s new for other persons. Developmental Psychology , 39, 906–912. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M., Strosberg, R., & Akhtar, N.
(1996) Eighteen-month-old children learn words in non-ostensive contexts. Journal of Child Language , 23, 157–176. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Vaish, A., Demir, Ö.E., & Baldwin, D.
(2011) Thirteen- and 18-month-old infants recognize when they need referential information. Social Development , 20, 431–449. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Vincent-Smith, L., & Bricker, D.B.W.
(1974) Acquisition of receptive vocabulary in the toddler-age child. Child Development , 45, 189–193. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wilkinson,K.M., Dube, W.V., & Mcilvane, W.J.
(1998) Fast mapping and exclusion (emergent matching) in developmental language, behavior analysis, and animal cognition research. The Psychological Record 48 , 407–422.
Wittgenstein, L.
1953 Philosophical Investigations , Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Woodward, A.L., & Markman, E.M.
(1998) Early word learning. In W. Damon, D. Kuhn & R. Siegler (Eds.) Handbook of Child Psychology, Volume 2, Cognition, Perception and Language (pp. 371–420). New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Wu, Y.C., & Coulson, S.
(2007) How iconic gestures enhance communication: An ERP study. Brain and Language , 101, 234–245. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Yasuda, T., & Kobayashi, H.
(2010) The role of adults’ eye gaze direction in children’s learning part names. Handbook on the 12th Annual International Conference of the Japanese Society for Language Sciences (pp. 53–36).