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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 24, 2026

Portable Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL): Investigating Language Comprehension in Typically Developing Toddlers and Young Children with Autism

Portable Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL): Investigating Language Comprehension in Typically Developing Toddlers and Young Children with Autism

Published on: December 14, 2012

Pragmatic directions and children's word learning

E V Clark¹, J B Grossman

¹Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, CA 94305-2150, USA. eclark@psych.stanford.edu

Journal of Child Language

|May 30, 1998

Summary

Children aged two and three utilize adult instructions about word meaning relations to learn new words. Without guidance, they develop their own strategies for word meaning acquisition.

Area of Science:

Developmental Psychology
Linguistics
Child Language Acquisition

Background:

Children's ability to infer word meanings is crucial for language development.
Previous research suggests children leverage various cues for word learning, but the role of explicit relational instructions is less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether young children (two- and three-year-olds) use adult-provided information about semantic relationships when learning new words.
To examine children's word-learning strategies in the presence and absence of explicit relational instructions.

Main Methods:

A study involving 36 children (18 two-year-olds, 18 three-year-olds) learning novel terms.
Children received either specific instructions (superordinate or replacement relations) or no instruction regarding the relationship between two new words.

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Children's subsequent word learning and meaning assignments were observed.

Main Results:

Children demonstrated attentiveness to and utilization of adult instructions regarding word meaning relations.
When no relational instructions were provided, children employed diverse coping strategies to establish word meanings.
Both age groups successfully incorporated pragmatic directions into their word-learning process.

Conclusions:

Young children actively use pragmatic directions from adults to guide their inferences about new word meanings.
The findings highlight the significant role of adult guidance in shaping children's semantic development and word acquisition.
Children's word learning is not solely based on statistical regularities but is also influenced by social-communicative input.