Word Learning Techniques
By Savanna Richard, University of Lethbridge BSc
In the early years of life, children are in a constant state of learning. Gaining access to language is one of the most important steps in child development as it greatly enhances the child’s role as an active participant in their environment. But how exactly do children come to learn a language? This is a huge question that has had linguists, psychologists, and neuroscientists dedicating decades of research to it, with a plethora of uncertainties remaining in the field. However, there have been many findings that provide us with insight into some of the techniques used and assumptions made by children as they navigate the process of language learning. Researchers have been interested in children’s acquisition of individual words and through this work, a variety of word learning techniques have been identified, three of which I will discuss further.
Most objects are not a solid mass made up of only one material. When a parent holds their child’s toy and tells them that it is called a “truck,” it’s not usually made explicitly clear that that name refers to the entire truck, not just the wheels or the roof. However, the child will usually still take “truck” to represent the entire object. This word learning technique is referred to as the whole-object assumption (Hoff, 2014). The usefulness of this technique is apparent when you start to think about how overwhelming it would be to think of one word as representing each of those individual parts of the object and remembering them when they appear in other contexts. Word learning is already a huge organizational task for the brain, so the need for this grouping is logical.
In addition to this technique, the mutual-exclusivity bias states that children understand that different words refer to different things (Hoff, 2014). In other words, a new word is unlikely to be assumed to be a synonym for a word the child already knows. If the child is playing with a truck and a boat, and a parent says, “Let’s put the boat in the water,” the child will assign “boat” to the object for which they don’t already have a label. This assumption allows children to learn new words for objects without having them directly labeled for them. It also leads them to learn more specific parts of larger objects. For example, if a parent picked up the truck again and said, “These are the wheels,” the child will realize that the word “wheels” must refer to a specific part of the truck since there is already a word that addresses the entire object.
While these two techniques work well for nouns, what about verbs? The syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis suggests that children can use sentence structure to infer the meaning of new words, especially verbs (Hoff, 2014). It is difficult to explain the meaning of a verb without describing a situation in which the action is being performed. Through this principle, children can make assumptions about the meaning of a new word based on its position in the sentence and the presence of words they already know. For example, a child might hear the sentence, “Mommy is scooping the chocolate chips,” while watching their mother perform the action. Given that the child already knows the words “Mommy” and “chocolate chips” then they will use their knowledge of sentence structure to infer that “scooping” must be the action. Even into adulthood, this technique can be useful when we encounter an unfamiliar word. This technique, by definition, requires previous language knowledge but once the foundation is set, children are incredibly capable of picking up the patterns of language and using that knowledge to their advantage.
Learning language is a daunting task and a process that will likely continue to be difficult for researchers to fully understand. However, by breaking it down into the techniques discussed above, we can begin to understand the ways children are able to unravel the confusion and make incredible progress as little language learners.
Reference
Hoff, E. (2014). Language Development 5th Edition. Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Photo: https://blog.ted.com/how-to-learn-a-new-language-7-secrets-from-ted-translators/
https://theconversation.com/how-to-tell-if-your-child-has-a-speech-or-language-impairment-31768