The child as word learner

concepts of reference point and polarity, which presuppose concepts of dimension of comparison and zero point. These concepts can be probed nonlinguistically. For example, animals can be taught to choose the smaller, or larger, of two stimuli. It is likely that the standard sizes of objects are represented conceptually for the purpose of object recognition. Presented with a box the size of my desk, I am not likely to entertain the hypothesis that it is a box of Kleenex. Underlying the feature system characterizing the dimensions are many aspects of man's representation of space; concepts like vertical and horizontal, cross-section, and spatial extent itself are reflected in many nonlinguistic sensorimotor routines (see Miller and JohnsonLaird 1976; H. H. Clark 1973). As the child learns a new spatial adjective, what aspects of its conceptual underpinnings are mapped onto it early and what aspects, if any, take years to work out? Two positions within the framework of the missing-feature theory have been held. The first position is that the child's initial mapping is between the word and the features specifying the relevant dimension of comparison. The missing feature is polarity, the direction from zero. On this view, both narrow and wide would have the incomplete lexical entry: [Adj] [comparative] [spatial extent] [-primary] [ vertical], making the two words synonyms (Donaldson and Wales 1970; H. H. Clark 1 970; E. V. Clark 1973; Klatzky et al. 1973). The two words need not have identical incomplete lexical entries simultaneously. For example, [+pole] might be added to the representation of wide before [ pole] is to narrow. In this case narrow means what wide did before