The acquisition of compositional meaning

Abstract

How do people create meaning from a string of sounds or pattern of dots? Insights into this process can be obtained from the way children acquire sentence meanings. According to the well-known principle of compositionality, the meaning of an expression is a function of the meanings of its parts and the way they are syntactically combined. However, children frequently seem to ignore syntactic structure in their sentence interpretations, suggesting that syntax is merely one of the sources of information constraining meaning and does not have a special status. A fundamental assumption in the argument in favour of compositionality is that speakers and listeners generally agree upon the meanings of sentences. Remarkably, however, children as listeners do not always understand what they are able to produce as speakers, and vice versa. For example, children's production of word order appears to develop ahead of their comprehension of word order in the acquisition of languages like English and Dutch. Such production–comprehension asymmetries are not uncommon in child language and motivate a view of compositionality as a principle pertaining to the result of perspective taking, and of meaning composition as a process of speaker–listener coordination. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Towards mechanistic models of meaning composition’.

Revisiting the hypothesis of language retrogenesis from an evolutionary perspective.

“…In general, as summarized by Bates and Dick (2002), acquisition goes through distinctive, although partially overlapping stages: (multi)word comprehension (8–10 months), single word production (11–13 months), basic word combination (18–20 months), emergence of first functional words (24–30 months), and use of simple syntactic structures, including different types of sentences (i.e., declarative, interrogative, imperative; 30–34 months). Throughout the whole process, comprehension precedes production (Visser-Bochane et al, 2020), although an inverse pattern can be observed with regard to some specific aspects of language (e.g., word order or object pronouns; see Hendriks, 2020). Concerning the two domains of interest for our analysis (lexicon and syntax), word comprehension in children typically precedes expressive vocabulary acquisition (Messer, 2015; Roemer et al, 2019), just as syntax understanding precedes syntax production (Huttenlocher et al, 2002).…”

A Cognitive Linguistics Study of the Conceptual Derivation of Word Meaning

“…(Bendy,et al, 2006). Hendriks (2019) conducts a study of how children create meaning from a series of patterns or sounds. Due to the concept of luminous formation, the meaning of a statement is a function of its parts meanings and their grammatical combination.…”

Modelling meaning composition from formalism to mechanism

“…movement) as well as for neurolinguistics. Finally, Hendriks [60] proposes that compositionality arises as a constraint on meaning in tasks that require coordination between speakers and hearers. She applies insights from optimality theory, and empirical data on asymmetries between comprehension and production in child language use, to derive the principle of compositionality from perspective taking: sentences may be guaranteed to have compositional meaning only when speakers take listeners into account.…”