Early Word Learning And Concept Formation

This dissertation provides an overview of the relationship between word learning and concept formation in children with the aim of peeping into the relationship between language and thought and providing theoretical aid to language acquisition research.Concepts are considered to be constituents of thought while there are theories postulating that language determines thought or, in a refined version, influences ways of thinking. The former is what is called linguistic determinism and the latter linguistic relativity. The relationship between language and concept has long been a focal question in the cognitive sciences. Recently considerable attention has been given to the origin of this relation in children. Researches mainly focus on early word-learning because learning a word involves establishing a relationship between a language unit (the word) and a conceptual unit (the concept to which the word refers). Whether there exists such a relation between language and concepts, i.e. whether language influences acquisition of concepts and concepts influence acquisition of language, is vitally important to our understanding of language acquisition, especially of second language acquisition. This paper summarizes evidences suggesting that language influences the development of concepts, with aims to further explore the dynamic mechanism in the process of language acquisition.Language and concept formation are so interwoven that the relative positions they occupy with respect to one another are very difficult to specify. Generally speaking, conceptual knowledge provides input to language; language in turn uses these concepts for the encoding and decoding of sentences. Because of these strikingly close relations, it is proposed here that the acquisition and development of word meaning be reformulated in terms of verbal concept learning, while the relationship be treated in the framework of language development.In sum, the current results reveal that a link between linguistic and conceptual units is available early enough to guide infants first steps in word-learning. To characterize this link with greater precision, it is critical to examine infants sensitivity to various properties of the speech signal, including acoustic, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of words, as they unfold over development and as they relate to meaning.The paper consists of five chapters. The introduction presents the theoretical background of the study, states the questions to be answered in this thesis and points out the significance of the study. Chapter two provides a review of the literature, which gives an overview of theories and studies on the relationship between concept and language as well as the acquisition of both. Based on the review of the literature, research questions are raised. Chapter three then looks specifically to children's early word learning and how this processes is related to (or not related to) concept formation. Chapter four is devoted to concept formation and possible influences of words on the process. The conclusion provides a brief summary of the whole thesis including research findings and limitations of the study as well as how this limitations may be solved by further research.