The DOI matches its Crossref record; 36 of the 36 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Constraints children place on word meanings
Open accessAbstract
This paper views lexical acquisition as a problem of induction: Children must figure out the meaning of a given term, given the large number of possible meanings any term could have. If children had to consider, evaluate, and rule out an unlimited number of hypotheses about each word in order to figure out its meaning, learning word meanings would be hopeless. Children must, therefore, be limited in the kinds of hypotheses they consider as possible word meanings. This paper considers three possible constraints on word meanings: (1) The whole object assumption which leads children to interpret novel terms as labels for objects—not parts, substances, or other properties of objects: (2) The taxonomic assumption which leads children to consider labels as referring to objects of like kind, rather than to objects that are thematically related: and (3) The mutual exclusivity assumption which leads children to expect each object to have only one label. Some of the evidence for these constraints is reviewed.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
(1960) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 5,851
A Handbook of Child Psychology
(1934) · Nature · doi:10.1038/133515b0 · Cited by 2,273
Bruner, J. S., Olver, R. R., & Greenfield, P. M. (1966) · Cited by 2,002
Structure and Strategy in Learning to Talk
Nelson, K. (1973) · Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development · doi:10.2307/1165788 · Cited by 1,881
Language Learnability and Language Development
Bialystok, E., & Pinker, S. (1986) · The Modern Language Journal · doi:10.2307/327334 · Cited by 1,816
Advances in the Psychology of Human Intelligence
(2014) · Psychology Press eBooks · doi:10.4324/9781315808246 · Cited by 1,754
Advances in developmental psychology
Lamb, M. E., Brown, A. L., & Rogoff, B. (1981) · Lawrence Erlbaum Associates eBooks · Cited by 1,686
Language Learnability and Language Development
Pye, C., & Pinker, S. (1985) · Language · doi:10.2307/414499 · Cited by 1,665
Halliday, M. A. K. (1975) · Foundations of Language Development · doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-443701-2.50025-1 · Cited by 1,604
Advances in the psychology of human intelligence
Eysenck, H. J. (1983) · Behaviour Research and Therapy · doi:10.1016/0005-7967(83)90111-0 · Cited by 1,563
Cited by
Infants rapidly learn word-referent mappings via cross-situational statistics
Smith, L., & Yu, C. (2008) · Cognition · doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2007.06.010 · Cited by 989
Fitch, W. T. (2010) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511817779 · Cited by 594
Embodied attention and word learning by toddlers
Yu, C., & Smith, L. B. (2012) · Cognition · doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2012.06.016 · Cited by 502
PRIMIR: a developmental framework of infant speech processing
Werker, J. F., & Curtin, S. (2005) · Language Learning and Development · doi:10.1080/15475441.2005.9684216 · Cited by 484
A model of destination-language acquisition: Application to male immigrants in Canada
Chiswick, B. R., & Miller, P. W. (2001) · Demography · doi:10.1353/dem.2001.0025 · Cited by 434
Metadata
- Authors
- Markman, E.
- Venue
- Cognitive Science
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 1990-03
- Volume
- 14
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 57-77
- ISSN
- 0364-0213 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2029385256
- Cited by
- 697
- References
- 36
- FWCI
- 8.29
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Constraints children place on word meanings. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/0364-0213(90)90026-s
- The paper
- Markman, E. (1990). Constraints children place on word meanings. Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1016/0364-0213(90)90026-s
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
