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Lexical development and overextension in child language*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Martyn D. Barrett
Martyn D. Barrett
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
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Abstract

A common assumption underlying the semantic feature and the functional core hypotheses of lexical development is that attributes abstracted from the referents of a word are sufficient to determine the extension of that word. The present paper begins by challenging this assumption. A contrastive hypothesis is instead advanced to explain the early lexical development of children, and the predictions of this hypothesis are shown to be consistent with available data on overextension. The paper concludes with a critical discussion of the semantic feature and the functional core hypotheses in which it is shown that neither of these hypotheses can account for the data on overextension.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , June 1978 , pp. 205 - 219
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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Footnotes

[*]

The author is indebted to Roger Goodwin for many useful discussions which took place during the genesis of this paper. Address for correspondence: 10 Goldsmid Road, Hove, Sussex BN3 1QA, UK.

References

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