COMD 4380 Chapter : Child Lang Oct 8 Semantics
Document Summary
Semantics: the process of relating words to those referents is called semantic development, during the course of this semantic development, this changes. Semantics is the study of language meaning, which can be expressed verbally, vocally and gesturally. You can see or touch honk, but you know what it means and what they are referring to: the concepts that we have involve mental representations that are social constructs not mental picture. Scientific approach to word meanings= our representation is categorical. A symbolic representation of a concept is complex just like acoustical properties are a complex for phoneme categories. The semantic feature theory suggest that children acquire these contextual categories by linking members that share similar features (a horse is a dog, a dog is a dog, a cow is a dog) When children are young, any man is dada they are generalizing and shaping these categories and until they get older do they begin to understand the names of people.
