Editing Language acquisition (section)

==Meaning==

Children learn, on average, ten to fifteen new word meanings each day, but only one of these can be accounted for by direct instruction.<ref name="Landauer"/> The other nine to fourteen word meanings must have been acquired in some other way. It has been proposed that children acquire these meanings through processes modeled by [[latent semantic analysis]]; that is, when they encounter an unfamiliar word, children use contextual information to guess its rough meaning correctly.<ref name="Landauer">{{cite journal |last1=Landauer |first1=Thomas K. |last2=Dumais |first2=Susan T. |title=A solution to Plato's problem: The latent semantic analysis theory of acquisition, induction, and representation of knowledge. |journal=Psychological Review |date=April 1997 |volume=104 |issue=2 |pages=211–240 |doi=10.1037/0033-295x.104.2.211 }}</ref> A child may expand the meaning and use of certain words that are already part of its [[mental lexicon]] in order to denominate anything that is somehow related but for which it does not know the specific word. For instance, a child may broaden the use of ''mummy'' and ''dada'' in order to indicate anything that belongs to its mother or father, or perhaps every person who resembles its own parents; another example might be to say ''rain'' while meaning ''I don't want to go out''.<ref>{{cite book|author= Fry, Dennis|year=1977|title=Homo loquens, Man as a talking animal|url= https://archive.org/details/homoloquensmanas00fryd|url-access= registration|publisher=Cambridge University Press|pages= [https://archive.org/details/homoloquensmanas00fryd/page/115 115–116]|isbn=978-0-521-29239-9}}</ref>

There is also reason to believe that children use various [[heuristic]]s to infer the meaning of words properly. [[Ellen Markman|Markman]] and others have proposed that children assume words to refer to objects with similar properties ("cow" and "pig" might both be "animals") rather than to objects that are thematically related ("cow" and "milk" are probably not both "animals").<ref name="Markman 1990">{{cite journal| last1=Markman| first1=Ellen M.| title=Constraints Children Place on Word Meanings| journal=Cognitive Science| volume=14| issue=1| year=1990| pages=57–77| doi=10.1207/s15516709cog1401_4| doi-access=free}}</ref> Children also seem to adhere to the "whole object assumption" and think that a novel label refers to an entire entity rather than to one of its parts.<ref name="Markman 1990" /> This assumption along with other resources, such as grammar and morphological cues or lexical constraints, may help the child in acquiring word meaning, but conclusions based on such resources may sometimes conflict.<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Hansen|first1=Mikkel B.|last2=Markman|first2=Ellen M.|title=Children's use of mutual exclusivity to learn labels for parts of objects.|journal=Developmental Psychology|language=en|volume=45|issue=2|pages=592–596|doi=10.1037/a0014838|pmid=19271842|year=2009}}</ref>