- Bruno Baege, “Zur Entwicklung der Verhaltensweise junger Hunde in den ersten drei Lebensmonaten,” Zeitschrift für Hundeforschung, III (1933), 18.
- See, for example, Nathan Stemmer, An Empiricist Theory of Language Acquisition (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), p. 51 ff.
- I am using such anthropomorphic speech only for the sake of simplicity. It is possible to reformulate this analysis in more technical terms.
- See, for example, George Stanley Reynolds, A Primer of Operant Conditioning (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1968), p. 46 ff., on the control of a generalization by a particular stimulus-dimension.
- The process can be accelerated, for example, if parents say to their child, “This is not a dog; it is a cat.” For this statement to have the desired effect, however, the child must already be able to understand expressions in which not occurs. For a discussion of this subject and also an examination of other methods which enable a child to correct his linguistic beliefs, see my Empiricist Theory of Language Acquisition, p. 22 ff.
- Cf. Bertrand Russell, Philosophy (New York: Norton, 1927), p. 53: “On behaviorist lines, there is no important difference between proper names and what are called ‘abstract’ or ‘generic’ terms. A child learns to use the word “cat”, which is general, just as he learns to use the word “Peter”, which is a proper name. But in actual fact “Peter” really covers a number of different occurrences, and is in a sense general. Peter may be near or far, walking or standing or sitting, laughing or frowning. All these produce different stimuli….”
- The experiences are a combination of those which enable a child to restrict and to widen his linguistic beliefs.
- See, for example, Morris Michael Lewis, Language, Thought, and Personality (New York: Basic Books, 1963), p. 51.
- This process corresponds to conditional discrimination. See, for example, John M. Warren, “Primate Learning in Comparative Perspective,” in Behavior of Nonhuman Primates, I, ed. Allan M. Schrier, Harry F. Harlow, and Fred Stollnitz (New York: Academic Press, 1965), p. 271 ff.
- Terms like sleeps and all are normally learned in contextual processes. Therefore, one can speak of the classes that are referred to by such terms only in those cases in which the terms occur within an appropriate verbal context. See my Empiricist Theory, p. 48 ff.
- Katherine Nelson, “Concept, Word, and Sentence: Interrelations in Acquisition and Development,” Psychological Review, LXXXI (1974), 267–285.
- Actually, the criterion is affected by Quine's criticism of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy. (See, for example, Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object [Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1960], p. 61 ff.) But it would lead us too far afield to enter into this question here.
- Actually, Nelson admits that a child will not normally say ball [that is] round. However, she does not draw the necessary conclusions from this observation.
- The example of holds is studied in Stemmer, An Empiricist Theory, p. 56 ff.
- Margaret Donaldson and James McGarrigle, “Some Clues to the Nature of Semantic Development,” Journal of Child Language, I (1974), 185–194.
- Besides these rules, children also use syntactic rules. But they can be ignored here.
- Since the idiosyncrasy seems to be shared by young children in general, it is presumably a consequence of their particular maturational stage, rather than of the experiences which they have (or have not) undergone.
- But see n. 10 above.
- Susan E. Haviland and Eve V. Clark, “This Man's Father is My Father's Son: A Study of the Acquisition of English Kin Terms,” Journal of Child Language, I (1974), 23–47.
- Eve V. Clark, “What's in a Word? On the Child's Acquisition of Semantics in His First Language,” in Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Language, ed. Timothy E. Moore (New York: Academic Press, 1973) p. 72 ff.
- Manfred Bierwisch, “Semantics,” in New Horizons in Linguistics, ed. John Lyons (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1970), p. 172 ff.
- The same results were also obtained with respect to the terms mother and sister.
- See Rudolph Carnap, Introduction to Symbolic Logic and Its Applications (New York: Dover, 1958), p. 220 ff.
- In spite of the fact that their investigation shows that there is no difference between the order of acquisition of the terms father and brother, they still insist on assigning to brother a higher degree of complexity than to father (see Haviland and Clark, p. 44).
- Some of the cognitive aspects which relate to language acquisition during contextual verbal processes are discussed in my “Concepts and Abstractions,” Communication & Cognition, V (1972), 47 ff., and in my Empiricist Theory, p. 114 ff.
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Volume 27, 1971 - Issue 1-3: Child Language--1975