Ling 425/709
Study Questions

Semantic Development

1. What are the classical and metaphorical theories of lexical meaning?

2. What four general issues influence the study of meaning?

3. What are four problems for a semantic theory that relies on semantic features?

4. What are two problems for prototype theories of meaning?

5. Why does Clark’s (1973) Semantic Feature Hypothesis predict early overextensions?

6. Why does Nelson’s (1974) Functional Core Concept Theory predict early underextensions?

7. What are two problems that affect both theories?

8. How did Anglin (1977) operationally define a word’s semantic extension?

9. How did Anglin operationally define a word’s semantic intension?

10. What is Anglin’s hypothesis about children’s initial word meanings?

11. Do Anglin’s results support Brown’s hypothesis that children begin with word meanings at an intermediate level?

12. What are two difficulties in assigning children’s word meanings to an intermediate level?

13. What three factors did Anglin report govern the development of word meaning?

14. Describe the materials Anglin used to test children’s semantic extensions.

15. What did Anglin discover about children’s underextensions and overextensions?

16. How did the experimental materials Anglin used affect his results on semantic extensions?

17. What part did individual variation play in Anglin’s results?

18. What did Anglin conclude about children’s knowledge of semantic intension?

19. What did Bowerman discover about children’s semantic extensions for verbs?

20. Does semantic extension on the basis of subjective experience support the Semantic Feature Hypothesis? Explain.

21. Does semantic extension on the basis of subjective experience support the Functional Core Concept Theory? Explain.

22. Describe an example of individual variation in Bowerman’s findings.

23. What evidence suggests that Eva has acquire the adult meaning for the word ‘kick’?

24. How does Eva’s use of the word ‘kick’ differ from that of an adult speaker?

25. How could Eva use positive evidence to acquire the adult meaning of ‘kick’?

26. What is Quine’s problem?

27. Why were innate constraints on word meaning proposed to solve Quine’s problem?

28. What is the Whole Object Bias?

29. What is the Taxonomic Bias?

30. What is the Mutual Exclusivity Bias?

31. What is a problem in extending the whole object bias to verbs?

32. How did Soja, Carey & Spelke (1991) test children’s ontological categories?

33. How did their results show that children distinguish between objects and substances?

34. What are two limitations to their study?

35. How do Imai & Gentner (1997) address the limitations in Soja, Carey & Spelke’s study?

36. Do Japanese and American subjects make the same distinctions between objects and

      substances?

37. How did Landau, Leyton, Lynch & Moore (1992) demonstrate the effect of object theory on children’s attention to object shape?

38. What did Choi & Bowerman (1991) demonstrate about the onset of cross-linguistic differences in word meaning?

39. What do Brown’s (2001) observations add about our knowledge of cross-linguistic semantic differences?

40. What did Pye, Loeb & Pao (1996) demonstrate about the cross-linguistic development of verb meaning?