Assessment #1: Lexical Categories

Table 1 (from Susan R. Braunwald (1978), Context, word and meaning, in Andrew Lock (Ed.), Action, Gesture and Symbol, pp. 485-527, New York: Academic Press) gives the acquisition of her daughter Laura’s first 50 words. Classify these words according to Nelson’s (1978) semantic categories as presented in Ingram, Table 6.3 (8 points). Table 6.7. is also helpful. (Use the ‘context of first use’ in Braunwald’s table). Is Laura an expressive or referential child, based on Table 6.4(2 points)? Discuss any difficulties you found in assigning semantic categories to five words in Laura’s data (8 points).

Ling 709 students: Discuss an implication that the problems you identified in categorizing Laura’s words have for Gentner’s Natural Partitions Hypothesis (3 points).