Meaning and learning: Response to Moerk

DEVELOPMENTAL REVIEW 6, 386-394 (1986)

Meaning and Learning: Response to Moerk

KATHERINE NELSON

City University of New York Graduate Center

In response to Moerk (1986, Developmental Review, 6, 365-385) the following points are discussed: (a) Semantic and conceptual development must be conceived in terms of systems that undergo developmental change. (b) Objects are viewed as embedded in events and as being conceptualized first within a syntagmatic and later a paradigmatic system. (c) While the nature of the input to the child is important, its effects cannot be considered independently of the state of the child’s conceptual and linguistic system. (d) The neurological considerations discussed by Moerk are not relevant to the particular developmental issues discussed in my book. C 1986 Academx Pre,s. Inc

I welcome the opportunity to respond to Moerk’s (1986) thoughtful review of my work. Although I am appreciative of the in-depth coverage and the generally accurate interpretation, there are points that I think were misconstrued and main themes that were overlooked. In this response I emphasize these and also consider briefly Moerk’s own emphasis on neurological function and the role of teaching in semantic development .

DEVELOPMENTAL CHANGE

A major theme of the book is that conceptual and semantic development must be conceived within a developmental model, that is, one in which the relations between experience and knowledge change as the knowledge system itself undergoes growth and qualitative change. This is a constructivist stance insofar as it rejects simple and unchanging cause- effect relations between environmental input and learning, and insofar as it assumes cognitive processes that operate on both input and prior knowledge in the absence of specific input. There is no necessary impli- cation from this that construction operates independently of experience; indeed, my framework suggests how an experientially derived model of the world may serve as the basis for the derivation of abstract conceptual systems. Experience is conceived to be idiosyncratic and to include people and their interactions (including didactic teaching) within socially and culturally defined activities (thus the connection to Vygotsky). But

Requests for reprints should be sent to Dr. Katherine Nelson, Developmental Psy- chology, CUNY Graduate School, 33 West 42nd Street, Box 300, New York, NY 10036.

386

0273-2297/86 $3.00 Copyright Q 1986 by Academic Press. Inc. All rlghrs of rcproduclion in any fornl icsavrd.

RESPONSE TO MOERK 387

the emphasis in the book (as noted by Moerk) is not on the nature of those experiences, but on how the child can make sense of them and use them in constructing a model of the world and the language. This is neither a Piagetian nor a Chomskyan approach, but one that accords with recent theories in cognitive science based on the notion of cognitive or mental models (e.g., Cohen & Murphy, 1984; Lakoff, 1982; Murphy & Medin, 1985; Neisser, in press). It might best be characterized as a functional (as opposed to structural) cognitivist position (Beilin, 1983).

Within this general framework I have emphasized that the problems of lexical development are different at different developmental points. While functionalists attempt to avoid the structuralist’s attribution of general stages, observed systematic qualitative change demands explana- tion. The problems faced by the child learning first words are those involved in determining what words refer to. That these are major problems with varying solutions depending upon the interactive communicative system that the child inhabits is indicated by the long period from first word (at 10 to 13 months) to the “vocabulary explosion” and multiword utterances (at about 18 to 20 months); and by the different strategies that children take to enter into language. Both the length of time and the strategy adopted may well be influenced by parental treatment, but no simple cause-effect relations between them have been-or can be-demonstrated. It has never been shown that a 12-month-old child can be induced to acquire a large vocabulary quickly through mod- eling, reinforcement, or any other instructional techniques. Rather the bulk of the literature indicates that the individual characteristics of each child-parent system make it impossible to predict the general effect of any particular parental approach to language teaching. For example, recent studies on the influence of emerging phonological systems on lexical acquisitions (Smith & Locke, in press) indicate that children’s idiosyncratic constructions of phonology play a determining role in vocabulary development in the early stages. This system is not under the control of adult input, except in the global sense that exposure to a particular language influences the sound system that the child will construct. In a similar way, what the child knows of objects will influence what names she/ he will learn. And although parents are responsible for equipping the child’s world with objects, they do not dictate those things that the child will find especially valuable, important, or interesting. Any observer- and parent-can provide innumerable examples of uniquely child-valued objects, from the ubiquitous security blanket to the forbidden electric outlet.

The problem of lexical development faced at the point where a begin- ning vocabulary has been established and multiword constructions have begun is a different one from that of the earlier period. In this phase of development the child acquires words at a dizzying pace (the frequently

388 KATHERINE NELSON

cited 20 words per day between 2 and 6 years). Here again the learning model is too simple to explain the facts: parents simply do not take the time to present all these new words in the careful, systematic way out- lined by Moerk as necessary to the learning process. Rather than depending upon the didactic efforts of parents, children seem to be “tuned” to “pick up” the words they need and want. I posited that during this period they map words directly onto their conceptual representations (i.e., their cognitive models), and that the richness and complexity of their representations makes possible the rapid acquisition of new words (fast mapping in Carey’s (1978) terms). But one-to-one mapping of words to concepts has cognitive and communicative drawbacks in the long run. First, the child’s experientially based concepts frequently differ in significant ways from the word meanings encoded in the language system; thus words may be used in limited or distorted ways. Examples of these effects are provided in the book. Second, words embedded in conceptual representations tend to be used inflexibly (evidence for inflexibility is also presented). Third, a symbolic system divorced from the conceptual base is essential to the handling of such abstractions as the class inclusion hierarchy or the construction of contrastive relations. Moerk is probably correct in suggesting that this metasemantic level (i.e., conscious manip- ulation of lexical relations) may depend upon schooling and that many people may not achieve it. However, the differentiation of a semantic from a conceptual system, and the concomitant realization of specifically semantic relations (e.g., antonymity) are prerequisite to the achievement of a metasemantic level; and evidence suggests that such differentiation takes place during the preschool years, exemplified in the increased sen- sitivity to word play, understanding opposites, metaphoric uses, and so on.

In brief, my proposal is a developmental one, reflecting the differential state of the knowledge and language systems at different developmental points. Moerk has (no doubt unintentionally) distorted my discussion (or at least my intent) in suggesting that the Clark-Nelson controversy is a central theme of the book that nonetheless remains to be reconciled. My intent was to suggest a reconciliation of the three components of meaning (reference, denotation, and sense) within a developmental model, as the child gradually masters each in turn, from referential-perceptual to de- notational-conceptual, and finally to a sense-linguistic system. My major remaining disagreement with Clark is not on the utility of perceptual information, but on her assumption that a lexical system based on the analysis of linguistic features and relations is established from the outset. I see this establishment rather as the product of a long process of analysis of a more basic or primitive representational system.

Moerk apparently objects to the characterization of development at the


third level in terms of a separate (linguistic) semantic system, and suggests a reorganization of the conceptual system instead. I would not argue against the latter but rather suggest that it results from the former. I have laid out what I consider to be convincing evidence for two differen- tiated systems in the discussion in Chapter 6 of the book. The process of construction of semantic relations and categories based on linguistic dis- tinctions is similar in my view to the construction of grammatical categories, such as subject or transitive verb or the grammatical gender system. These categories have been extensively studied (e.g., Bates & McWhinney 1982; Bowerman, 1982; Maratsos, 1982) and evidence for the constructive processes involved in their organization and reorganization has been set forth. Unless one is willing to buy fairly strong nativist assumptions (and clearly Moerk is not) it is necessary to accept some form of constructivist processes in order to account for the development of these categories, since the evidence is incontrovertible (I believe) that neither parent nor child is conscious of them as such and parents do not engage in explicit teaching of them. It seems but a short step to the proposal that semantic categories are similarly composed through similar an- alytic processes.

Within this theoretical framework I have tried to explain both idiosyncratic and universal aspects of development. Idiosyncrasies and uniformities in conceptual and linguistic uses are evident throughout life. Both need to be taken into account in theoretical explanations. The real chal- lenge is to find uniformities of process that underlie different learning experiences. But these uniformities must be based on cognitive processes, not on uniformities of input, which is highly variable. I would agree that study of the input is important (and I have contributed to the literature in this domain), but it alone will not explain the acquisition of meaning by the child. Taking into account cultural influences does not imply a simple equation between culture and learning.

Heath’s (1983) work on the different expectations by adults of language learning children in different American subcultures, and their related out- comes is of considerable interest in this regard, although her method is interpretive rather than experimental. She has documented the very different treatment of young children in two different communities within a single town. In one community children were expected to learn words for things (and pictures) and were rewarded for their success, in line with Moerk’s model and typical of many middle-class families. In the other community children were not taught language at all, and certainly were not taught names of things, nor were they praised or otherwise rewarded for talking. Talking was one of the many things that children had to learn how to do by themselves. Clearly the different expectations and parental practices produced children whose language skills were on the whole dif-


ferent; but equally clearly, different children in each community acquired language at differrent rates and to some extent in different ways. Ulti- mately an interaction model needs to include both the cultural-social- learning experiences of the child and also a proposal about the developing cognitive systems that process those experiences. In my book I focused on the latter while paying tribute to the importance of the former. Moerk would prefer that I had studied the former before proposing a model of the cognitive systems involved. Since both are needed, I do not see that one has priority over the other.

OBJECTS VS EVENTS

My earlier work (e.g., Nelson 1974) focused on the child’s understanding of objects and object terms and suggested that understanding was based on the child’s view of the function of objects. Since then I have taken the position that the central emphasis on object knowledge in developmental and cognitive psychology is misdirected. Instead I have emphasized and studied the child’s understanding of events, in which objects play a role to be sure. Much of the present book is devoted to a consideration of the relation between objects and events, how object knowledge is derived from events, and how relations in event representations may be used to construct relations among object concepts and hence among object words. This is described in terms of a syntagmatic- paradigmatic model of conceptual representation from which semantic relations are derived. It is not, however, the case that the event representation model was derived from the original functional core model, as Moerk suggests. Rather the ER model was developed on the basis of independent evidence, and relations between the two were subsequently delineated. Thus, again, the functional core model is no longer a central theme of my work, although it has a place in the larger framework that I have developed. The claims of the FCM have been widely misunderstood (see e.g., Nelson, 1983); however, this book is neither a defense of these claims nor a modification of them but rather a consideration of the broader issues that are involved in a theory of semantic development in relation to conceptual development.

THE ROLE OF INPUT

Moerk emphasizes the importance of the study of input to the child for understanding conceptual and semantic development. My own reading of the literature suggests that there is more information available on input than he suggests. He has contributed significantly to this literature, but there are other studies not cited that are relevant to the issue; for example, Bruner’s work on joint attention and scaffolding (e.g., Bruner, 1983; Ninio & Bruner, 1978), which fit into the model Moerk endorses.


Further, Snow and Goldfield (1983) have discussed the uses of imitation in parent-child book reading exchanges. There is now, of course, a vast literature on “motherese” and its effects and noneffects on child language acquisition (see articles in The Journal of Child Languuge over the past 8 years). Nelson (1973) and Furrow and Nelson (1984) discussed the relation between the mother’s references to objects and the child’s learning of object terms. K. E. Nelson and Bonvillian (1978) employed the novel object-novel word paradigm Moerk calls for, as have a few others, including Ross, Nelson, Wetstone, and Tanouye (1986) and Lu- cariello (1985). Naturalistic observation of the uses of object terms at different levels of a hierarchy is reported also in Mervis (1984) and Lu- cariello and Nelson (in press). The point is not that all of these studies should have been cited (some are not yet published), but that more work has been done along these lines than was suggested, and on the whole it does not strongly support the position Moerk puts forward, which emphasizes the importance of systematic presentation of words for objects and the demonstration of object functions by parents. The 10 input variables he lists apply only to learning of isolated items, while the import of my approach (and that of Clark, Bowerman, and many others) is that the child is acquiring (constructing, learning) a system of meanings. It is only as a system that the vast and fast word learning that takes place can be explained. On the other hand, I would certainly agree that this learning does not “proceed in lock-step stages, immune from vagaries of environ- ment.” But the state of the child’s knowledge system is critical to what the child will learn from any didactic encounter. It is for this reason that characterizing the child’s lexical progress in simple environmental cause-behavioral effect terms is bound to be inadequate, and it is not surprising that the naturalistic observation studies cited typically find very weak relations between input variables such as frequency and feed- back and child word acquisition. In Lucariello’s (1985) study, for example, none of the mother talk variables, including frequency of naming objects, was significantly related to the child’s acquisition of object names, but the child’s developmental stage (before or after vocabulary spurt) was so related.

NEUROLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Moerk uses neurological evidence to suggest that both the functional core model and the event representation proposal confound levels of analysis. He proposes a level of primitive categorization based on the collicular system which is followed ontogenetically and microgenetically by “a fine differentiation of the features of the object in question.” I have no problem with this nor with the suggestion that a later step would be the detection of utilitarian features of the object. The utilitarian features


(i.e., Gibson’s affordances) are the ones that have functional significance (e.g., the wheels of a car). However, this does not seem to me to consti- tute a serious critique of either the functional core concept or my present position. Ontogenetically it may be true that there is a primitive stage of global affective categorization, but it is not clear what the evidence for such a stage is, nor has Moerk provided a guide to what the age range of this stage might be. In any event, by the stage of fast word learning (2 to 5 years) the child has certainly moved beyond global categorization and does engage in differentiation of objects in terms of features, utilitarian or otherwise. Moerk sees an important distinction between what the object does (its habitual behavior patterns) and what can be done with it. Cer- tainly these are different aspects of its functioning and its function in relation to the child, and they may pick out different important utilitarian features. I have also pointed out these different types of relations (Nelson, 1978), but I have viewed them primarily as relevant to different types of objects. For example, dogs do many different actions, while cups are things that actions are done to. I am not convinced that the distinction as applied to developing knowledge of a single object is very significant. In any event, even though the distinction between “hot” global cognition and “cool” analytical cognition is appealing, it seems to me largely irrelevant to the issues I discuss in the book, which are con- cerned with development within the analytical stage (if such there be) and with the relation between conceptual development and the development of a semantic system.

In summary, I do not view the state of knowledge in the field with as much discouragement as Moerk does. I see instead a great deal of data to be integrated into an explanatory theory, which I tried to set forth as persuasively as possible. This theory goes beyond a simple input-output analysis to propose internal structures and processes that might account for varying effects of similar input, as well as similar effects of varying inputs. Different theoretical assumptions lie behind Moerk’s call for further experimental research in input-output relations. The major draw- back to his proposal, as I see it, is that the kinds of experiments involved are not representative of the kinds of learning experiences that children have in the real world (as I noted earlier); and therefore they do not ad- dress the problems of the development of a semantic system. In contrast, my proposals have led to productive research investigating aspects of semantic development at different developmental points (e.g., French & Nelson, 1985; Kyratzis, Lucariello, Nelson, & Greenstein, 1986; Lucar- iello, 198.5); and this research has in general supported the proposals put forth in the book. Of course, I do not expect that the theory will go un- challenged or that it will not be superseded by a more adequate model of conceptual and semantic development. Nonetheless, at this point I be-


lieve it to be a productive model that can explain more of the data than other available alternatives.

REFERENCES

Bates, E., & McWhinney, B. (1982). Functionalist approaches to grammar. In E. Wanner & L. R. Gleitman (Eds.), Langrrage ncquisifion: The stute ofrhe art. New York: Cam- bridge Univ. Press.

Beilin, H. (1983). The new functionalism and Piaget’s program. In E. L. Scholnick (Ed.), Nerr, trends in conceptual representurion: Challenges to Piaget’s theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Bowerman, M. (1982). Reorganizational processes in lexical and syntactic development. In E. Wanner & L. R. Gleitman (Eds.), Language acquisition: The state of the urf. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Bruner, J. S. (1983). Child’s rcrlk: Learning 20 NSe language. New York: Norton. Carey, S. (1978). The child as word learner. In M. Halle, J. Bresnan. &G. A. Miller (Eds.),

Linguistic theory and p.sychological reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cohen, B., & Murphy, G. L. (1984). Models of concepts. Cognitive Science. 8, 27-58. French. L., & Nelson, K. (1985). Young c,hildren’s kno+tlledge of relational terms: Some ij?.

c)r.s and hrcts. New York: Springer-Verlag. Furrow, D.. & Nelson, K. (1984). Environmental correlates of stylistic differences in lan-

guage acquisition. Journal of child language. 11, 523-534. Heath. S. B. (1983). W(~ys nrifh bc’ords: Language, l$e and rr,ork in communities and

ckusroorns. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. Kyratzis, A., Lucariello, J., Nelson, K. & Greenstein, C. (1986). The role c?f slot-fuller

curegories in conceptual development. Manuscript in preparation. Lakoff, G. (1982). Categories and CoRniti\le models. Berkeley cognitive science rep. No. 2.

Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley Cognitive Science Program. Lucariello, J. (1985). Objects. conceprs, M,ords: Relations in early development. Unpub-

lished doctoral dissertation, City University of New York. Lucariello, J. & Nelson. K. (in press). Lexical specificity in mother-child discourse.

Jorrrnul of child langrrage. Maratsos, M. (1982). T/le child’s construction of‘ grammatical categories. In E. Wanner &

L. R. Gleitman (Eds.), Langauge ucquisition: The s/&e of the art. New York: Cam- bridge Univ. Press.

Mervis, C. B. (1984). Early lexical development: The contributions of mother and child. In C. Sophian (Ed.), Origins of cogrzitib’e .skil/s. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Moerk. E. ( 1986). The meaning of meaning: A review of Making sense: The ucquisition of shared meuning. Developmental Review’, 6, 365-385.

Murphy, G. L., & Medin, D. L. (1985). The role of theories in conceptual coherence. Psy- chological Rel,ieM,s, 92, 289-316.

Neisser, U. (in press). From direct perception to conceptual structure. In U. Neisser (Ed.), Concepts reconsidered: The ecologicul and intellectual bases of categorization. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Nelson, K. (1973). Structure and strategy in learning in fulli. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 38( l-2 Serial No. 149).

Nelson, K. (1974). Concept word and sentence: Interrelations in acquisition and development. Psychological Revien,, 81, 267-285.

Nelson, K. (1983). Concepts, words, and experiments: A rejoinder. Merrill-Palmer Quar- teAI, 29, 387-394.


Nelson, K. (1978). Explorations in the development of a functional semantic system. In W. Collins (Ed.), Child psychology, (Vol. 12). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Nelson, K. E., & Bonvillian, J. D. (1978). Early language development: Conceptual growth and related processes between 2 and 4% years of age. In K. E. Nelson (Ed.), Children’s /anguage (Vol. 1). New York: Gardner.

Ninio, A., & Bruner, J. S. (1978). The achievements and antecedents of labelling. Journal of Child Language, 5, 1-16.

Ross, G., Nelson, K., Wetstone, H., & Tanouye, E. (1986). Acquisition and generalization of novel object concepts by young language learners. Journal of Child Language, 13, 67-84.

Smith, M., & Locke, L. (Eds.) The emergent lexicon: The child’s development of a /in- guistic vocabulary. New York: Academic Press.

Snow, C. W., & Goldfield, B. A. (1983). Turn the page please: Situation-specific language acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 10, 551-569.

RECEIVED: January 27, 1986; REVISED: April 8, 1986.

Documents

Meaning and learning: Response to Moerk