Hard Words 1 Hard Words

How do children acquire the meaning of words? And why are words like know harder for learners to acquire than words like dog or jump? We suggest that a considerable part of the difficulty of acquiring the vocabulary of natural languages consists not in overcoming conceptual difficulties with abstract word meanings but rather in mapping these meanings onto their corresponding lexical forms. We sketch a theory of word learning that considers acquisition of the lexicon and of the clause-level syntax to be interlocked throughout their course, rather than distinct and separable parts of language learning. The machinery is set in motion by word-toworld pairing, a procedure that efficiently solves the mapping problem for a stock of concrete lexical items (mostly nouns), but only these. Armed with this basic stock of items, the learner accomplishes further lexical knowledge by an arm-over-arm process in which successively more sophisticated representations of linguistic structure are built. Lexical learning thereby can proceed by adding structure-to-world mapping to the earlier-available machinery. These further linguistic developments enable efficient solution of the mapping problem for the more abstract component of the lexical stock.. The outcome of this procedure is a highly lexicalized grammar whose usefulness does not end with successful learning. Rather, these detailed and highly structured lexical representations serve the purposes of the incremental multiple-cue processing machinery by which people produce speech and parse the speech that they hear. Acknowledgments: This research was partially supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health to John Trueswell and Lila Gleitman (#1-R01-HD37507) and Anna Papafragou (#F32MH65020).