Perception and Early Semantic Learning

Abstract

The development of the actor-action-object (transitivity) relation, universal and basic to language structure, is chosen as a test case for the nativism-empiricism issue. Assuming a cognitive basis for language acquisition, the thesis of this article is that the perceptual salience of certain aspects of events naturally foregrounds certain actions and entities and backgrounds others in a semantically predictable manner, dictating the structure of early sentences. Thus, the earliest utterances of the child reflect semantic considerations which are only later generalized into syntactic knowledge. It is this link with experienced reality which makes language learnable—rather than an unexperiencable abstract structure requiring innate specification.