Interactionist Theories Children are motivated to communicate with others Children pay attention to “clues” available when language is used Helps them to learn language

Evidence Consistent with Interactionist Theories Children use a variety of strategies to learn the meaning of new words

Fast Mapping: Process of rapidly learning a new word when a familiar and unfamiliar word are contrasted Ex: “chromium” and “red”

Whole-Object Assumption Expectation that a novel word refers to a whole object (rather than a part or other aspect of the object) Ex: “Cat” refers to whole cat, not its whiskers or other parts

Mutual Exclusivity Assumption Expectation that a novel word applies to an unfamiliar object Ex: “Show me the blicket”

Linguistic Context Grammatical form of a novel word influences children’s interpretation of it Ex: “sibbing” vs. “a sib” vs. “some sib”

Syntactic Bootstrapping Inferring the meaning of a word based on the grammatical structure of the sentence in which it is used Ex: “The duck is kradding the rabbit” OR “The duck and rabbit are kradding”

Pragmatic Cues Aspects of the social context that are used to infer the meaning of words Direction of gaze Intentionality

Criticisms of Interactionist Theories The rules involved in language are too complex to be learned simply through paying attention to “clues” available in language Especially true for syntactic development