Book: How Children Learn the Meanings of Words

Today I found in google search through a book titled "How Children Learn the Meanings of Words (Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change) (Hardcover)". I found this book at Amazon.com. The following review of the book:
How do children learn that the word "dog" refers not to all four-legged animals, and not just to Ralph, but to all members of a particular species? How do they learn the meanings of verbs like "think," adjectives like "good," and words for abstract entities such as "mortgage" and "story"? The acquisition of word meaning is one of the fundamental issues in the study of mind.According to Paul Bloom, children learn words through sophisticated cognitive abilities that exist for other purposes. These include the ability to infer others' intentions, the ability to acquire concepts, an appreciation of syntactic structure, and certain general learning and memory abilities. Although other researchers have associated word learning with some of these capacities, Bloom is the first to show how a complete explanation requires all of them. The acquisition of even simple nouns requires rich conceptual, social, and linguistic capacities interacting in complex ways.This book requires no background in psychology or linguistics

and is written in a clear, engaging style. Topics include the effects of language on spatial reasoning, the origin of essentialist beliefs, and the young child's understanding of representational art. The book should appeal to general readers interested in language and cognition as well as to researchers in the field.

And following a review of the consumer of the book:

By William J. Poser (Prince George, BC, Canada)
This book is a marvelous synthesis of research, by the author, his students, and many others, on how children learn the meanings of words. It makes clear why learning the meanings of words is a difficult task requiring explication, which is not immediately obvious, and then presents a great deal of evidence bearing on how it is done. As someone accustomed to reading very critically and frequently finding faults and gaps even in arguments to which I am sympathetic, I was amazed at how rarely I could find anything to quibble with. The book is also very balanced theoretically; the author considers a wide range of possible factors, from innate constraints on lexical semantics to general principles of theory of mind, and argues his case very fairly.

The book is not always easy reading, but it is always clear and pleasant. In a few cases the interpretation of an experiment described will not be entirely clear to someone with no background in psycholinguistics; in a few others, linguistic ideas are referred to without much explanation. Overall, however, the book should be accessible even to those without specialized training in linguistics or psychology.


By kent dahlgren (Portland, Oregon United States)
I have a two year old and a newborn. This topic is of immediate interest to me. But this isn't why I bought it.
As a product designer I wanted to gain some perspective on how we acquire language in the first place and found most of the documentation weak. Then I found this book.

I realy enjoyed reading it. I left my copy on the plane on a trip overseas and was greatly disapointed by the airlines failure to recover it (I sure hope the cleaning crew enjoyed it!). So I bought another copy immediately and continued reading.

For those of you who want to get the book can visit amazon.com

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