Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Children Develop Language and Thought?
Examine the proposed role of understanding another person’s communicative goal. Use Siegler’s distinction between a learning outcome and a process account to ask what the examples establish about the mechanism.
A question to consider. What comparison would distinguish learning from shared communicative context from merely associating a word with the most noticeable object?
Why this reading
A word does not announce what it refers to. Tomasello argues that children learn meanings partly by interpreting what a speaker is trying to communicate within a shared activity. The paper introduces a theory of learning that treats social understanding as part of the explanation rather than merely background to a word–object association.
Before you read
Pragmatics concerns how an utterance is interpreted in context. A referent is what a speaker is talking about; a communicative intention is what the speaker intends the listener to understand. Joint attention involves coordinating attention with another person. These terms name proposed processes, which must be connected to observable comparisons.
Read for
- Identify what the theory treats as distinctive about learning a linguistic symbol. Which premises distinguish it from the alternatives the author describes?
- Compare cases in which the same outward cue can have different meanings because the shared activity differs. What evidence makes an intention-based explanation informative?
- Examine the examples involving absent objects, unsuccessful actions, and broader utterances. Separate evidence against a simple association account from evidence that establishes a unique alternative.
Consider afterwards
- A child hears a new word while an adult searches for a missing object. Design two contexts with similar visible objects and sounds but different communicative goals. What outcomes would help evaluate the theory?
Editorial context
The article is an argument for a social-pragmatic account, supported by selected studies. Its characterization of competing theories is part of that argument, not a neutral verdict on every possible learning model. Sensitivity to intentions and learning from regularities need not be mutually exclusive. The original article appeared in Pragmatics in 2000; later digital publication dates do not change its historical position. Variation in language experience and social practices also matters when extending the account beyond the settings studied.