abstractness classification

Tue Jun 1 17:07:04 UTC 1999

Dear Joost,

in most of the cases, the classification within each category of
words (nouns, verbs, etc.) is not on the base of abstractness, as you
would, in order to test your hypothesis. However, as far as nouns are
concerned, there is the traditional distinction which is based on the
denotation of nouns and distinguishes between proper names and common
nouns, the classification of common nouns in nouns denoting abstract
concepts, properties, etc and nouns denoting concrete objects and the
classification of nouns denoting concrete objects in count nouns,
mass nouns and collective nouns.

Nouns:
1. Proper Names (i.e. Peter)
2. Common Nouns

Common Nouns:
i.  Nouns denoting abstract concepts, properties, etc (i.e. freedom)
ii. Nouns denoting concrete objects

Nouns denoting concrete objects
a. Count Nouns (i.e. ball)
b. Mass Nouns (i.e. water, sand)
c. Collective Nouns (i.e. furniture)

Many studies have been carried out since the early 70s, looking at
the acquisition of nouns belonging to different classes showing among
others that different types of bias are at work, when children learn
new words, i.e. taxonomic bias, whole-object bias, mutual exclusivity
bias, etc. Moreover studies dealing with the acquisition of nouns
have been testing the idea of semantic and syntactic bootstrapping.
Below you can find some literature on this topic.

However, I don't quite understand your hypothesis:
Why should language directed to a prelingual infant be more abstract
and contain many words that cannot easily be related to the concept
they refer to than language directed to a child who already has
started to produce or understand words?
Wouldn't we expect exactly the opposite, namely, that language
directed to a prelingual infant should contain more concrete words,
e.g. words that denote objects that are present at the speaking time,
objects that are familiar and/or belong to the child and words
referring to the actions that take place?

Best wishes,

Theodore Marinis

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Literature on the acquisition of noun classes:

Bloom, Paul (1994): Possible names: The role of syntax-semantics
mappings in the acquisition of nominals. - In: Lingua 92, 297-329.
Carey, S. (1994): Does learning a language require the child to
reconceptualize the world? - In: Lingua 92, 143-167
Chierchia, G. (1994): Syntactic Bootstrapping and the acquisition of
noun meanings: the mass-count issue. - In: Lust, B., M. Suner & J.
Whitman (eds.): Heads, Projections, and Learnability. Vol. 1.
Hollsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 301- 318.
Clark, E. V. (1973): What's in a word ? On the child's acquisition of
semantics in his first language. - In: T. E. Moore (ed.): Cognitive
development and the acquisition of language, 65-110. New York:
Academic Press.
Clark, E. V. (1993): The lexicon in acquisition. - New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Gathercole, V. (1986): Evaluating competing Linguistic Theories with
child language data: The case of the Mass-Count distinction.
Linguistics and Philosophy 9, 151-190.
Gelman, S.A. & M. Taylor (1984): How Two-Year-Old Children Interpret
Proper and Common Names for Unfamiliar Objects. - In: Child
Development 55, 1535-1540.
Golinkoff, R.M., K. Hirsh-Pasek, L.M. Bailey & N.R. Wenger (1992):
Young Children and Adults Use Lexical Principles to Learn New Nouns.
- In: Developmental Psychology 28, 99-108.
Gordon, P. (1985): Evaluating the semantic categories hypothesis: The
case of the count/mass distinction. - In: Cognition 20, 209-242.
Gordon, P. (1988): Count/mass category acquisition: distributional
distinctions in children's speech. Journal of Child Language 15,
109-128.
Hall, G. (1991): Acquiring proper names for familiar and unfamiliar
animate objects: Two-year-olds' word-learning biases. In: Child
Development 62, 1142-1154.
Huttenlocher, J. & P. Smiley (1987): Early Word Meanings: The Case of
Object Names. - In: Cognitive Psychology 19, 63-89.
Jones, S.S., L.B. Smith & B. Landau (1991): Object Properties and
Knowledge in Early Lexical Learning. - In: Child Development 62,
499-516.
Katz, N., E. Baker & J. Macnamara (1974): What's in a Name? A study
of how children learn common and proper names. - In: Child
Development 45, 469-473.
Macnamara, J. (1972): The cognitive basis of language learning in
children. Psychological Review 79, 1-13.
Macnamara, J. (1982): Names for Things. - Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books.
Markman, E. (1994): Constraints on word meaning in early language
acquisition. Lingua 92, 199-227.
Soja, N.N. (1994): Evidence for a distinct kind of noun. - In:
Cognition 51, 267-284.

There are also some articles on this topic in Child Development 1990,
1991 and in the Journal of Child Language 1993.

----------------------------------------------

>Dear Info-childes members,
>
>I was wondering if anyone could help me with the following:
>
>I have collected a corpus of linguistic input to a prelingual infant which
>includes language spoken not only directly to the infant but also to
>others who were usually in the infant's environment, including an older
>sister, the parents, and other caretakers.
>
>I want to use my corpus to test the following hypothesis: assuming that
>adults adapt their way of speaking to the child's linguistic level, I
>expect that language to a prelingual infant is more abstract (i.e., it
>contains relatively many words that cannot easily be related to the
>concept they refer to) than language to a child who already has started to
>produce or understand words.
>
>In order to test this hypothesis, I made a basic classification of words,
>dividing them into nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, pronouns, proper
>nouns, auxiliaries, determiners, and prepositions, because I thought that
>the distribution of these categories would give me a preliminary
>indication of how well the hypothesis is supported by the data. For
>instance, perhaps the percentage of nouns is higher in language to the
>older sister than to the infant because, in general, nouns are relatively
>concrete compared to verbs or adjectives.
>
>However, I am aware that within each category, there are differences too,
>a noun like 'ball' being easier than 'side' for instance.  My question
>therefore is: does anyone have a suggestion about how to make a
>classification within the categories, or can anyone give me references of
>comparable studies where I can find information on how to proceed?
>
>Any responses are more than welcome,
>
>
>
>Joost van de Weijer
>Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
>PO Box 310
>6500 AH  Nijmegen
>The Netherlands
>Tel: +31-(0)24-3521307
>Fax: +31-(0)24-3521213
>email: vdweijer at mpi.nl

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