MAPPING (FORM-MEANING)

The process of establishing a connection between the form of a word or inflection and the meaning that it represents. Mapping by an adult language user is highly automatic, as shown by the Stroop test, in which subjects are asked to name the colour of the ink in which a colour word such as GREEN is written. They find it difficult if the ink is (say) blue, because they have to override a highly automatised link between GREEN and the colour it represents.

An important issue is how an infant manages to establish word meaning links in acquiring its native language. If an adult points to a medium-sized animal and says ‘dog’, a child could in theory assume that the word refers to a subordinate kind (= POODLE), a superordinate kind (= PET), an individual (= FIDO), a quality (= BROWN)or part of the whole (= TAIL). In mapping the word DOG on to a sub-class of animals, the child appears to make a number of (possibly innate) assumptions about words and the way they are used. The following constraints have been identified:

The whole object assumption. Assume that the word relates to the whole rather than the part.

The taxonomic assumption. Assume that the word refers to a class of objects or actions rather than a chance association (dog does not mean an animal with a bone in its mouth).

The mutual exclusivity assumption. Assume that there is one label per concept. So, if a child does not have the word dog in its vocabulary, it will apply it to the whole object. If it already knows dog and hears tail, it will apply it to part of the object.

 In its early form-meaning mappings, the child appears to make two further assumptions. There is the expectation that the first words encountered will be at basic level (referring to DOG rather than ANIMAL or POODLE). There is also an assumption of equal detail: having acquired the concept DOG, the child assumes that the label cat will be at the same level of specificity.

Clark (1993) identifies two larger-scale assumptions:

Conventionality: that language is a system which links words and meanings in a consistent way.

Contrast: that distinct forms represent distinct meanings. This principle leads infants to reject apparent synonyms. Preference is given to an established word; and a new one is treated as filling a lexical gap (which may involve narrowing the range covered by the earlier word).

 The principle of contrast becomes more difficult to apply as the child’s vocabulary expands and it encounters instances where there is not a one-to-one mapping between form and concept. Lexically, homo nymy presents the infant with the challenge of having to map multiple meanings on to a single form (right ¼ ‘correct’ vs right ¼ ‘not left’). But there is no evidence that infants avoid homophones such as TAIL/ TALE, and they appear to accept readily that a single word form may fall into two different word classes (A NAME, TO NAME).

Children need minimal exposure to a new word form (sometimes just a single occurrence) before they assign some kind of meaning to it.

This phenomenon, referred to as rapid mapping, appears to help them to consolidate the form in their memory. The meaning first assigned may not coincide exactly with the adult one, though it often overlaps with it. Instances of over-extension or under-extension of the adult meaning are frequent. The initial hypothesis about the concept represented by a word is continually revised as new examples of the word form are encountered. If the word is polysemous, new variants of the core meaning are added.

 Besides lexical items, the child also has to learn to attach significance to inflections. There is evidence that inflections are acquired more easily when mapping is one-to-one. Two-year-old infants growing up bilingual in Hungarian and Serbo-Croatian could produce accurate inflections to express location in Hungarian; but expressed the concept erratically in Serbo-Croatian (Slobin, 1973). The difference was attributed to the fact that there is a single suffix for each type of location in Hungarian, whereas Serbo-Croatian uses a mixture of prepositions and less sharply differentiated inflections.

See also: Bootstrapping, Concept formation, Over-extension, Vocabulary acquisition

Further reading: Bloom (2001); Bowerman and Levinson (2001); Clark (1993: Chaps 3–5); Markman (1990, 1994); Markman and Hutchinson (1984); Slobin (1982)

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

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مواضيع ذات صلة

Problems with the dictionary view

The dictionary view

Dictionaries versus encyclopaedias

The encyclopaedic view of meaning

Embodiment and conceptual structure summary

Schematic systems

Semantic structure

Conceptual structure

Image schemas and abstract thought

Properties of image schemas

What is an image schema?

Image schemas