On the logic of contrast

Eve V. Clark

218 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Child Language

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Language Development and Disorders Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation Categorization, perception, and language

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Principle of Contrast, that different words have different meanings, holds for adult language use. But at what age do children assume Contrast ? Do they rely on it from the start, or do they assume that new words may have the same meaning (the Null Hypothesis) until they discover otherwise ? Both the Null Hypothesis and Contrast have certain consequences. The Null Hypothesis places a heavy burden on languagelearners, whereas children could discover Contrast as part of their experience of rational behaviour. Examples that have been claimed to go counter to Contrast fall into two groups. Those in the first do not in fact violate Contrast at all. Those in the second rely on sameness of extension instead of sameness of meaning, and so are indeterminate as counter evidence. Usage consistent with Contrast, on the other hand, is pervasive in children's speech from an early age.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 218 citations exist upstream.

References

2013Handbook of Social Psychology 2013Play, Dreams And Imitation In Childhood 1957Meaning 1990Handbook of social psychology 1976Word Formation in Generative Grammar 1916Cours de linguistique générale 1981Advances in developmental psychology 1976Language and context: The acquisition of pragmatics

Cited by

2014The inherence heuristic: An intuitive means of making sense of the world, and a potential precursor to psychological essentialism 2005The Principles of Conventionality and Contrast in Word Learning: An Empirical Examination.1989The Notion of Source in Language Acquisition 2014Inferring word meanings by assuming that speakers are informative 1990The Development of Verb Concepts: Children's Use of Verbs to Label Familiar and Novel Events 2005The role of inferences about referential intent in word learning: Evidence from autism

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.