Form and function in very early word learning

Learning a new word is, in part, acquiring an asso-ciation between the word and the object or event to which it refers, but mature word learners have honed their expectations how words are related to objects. Specifically, they understand that words are symbols that are used by speakers to communicate about refer-ents. A critical task in development, then, is learning about this relation between a word and its referent. A second critical task is determining which kinds of behaviors and signals serve this function. Although, in principle, the forms of words are arbitrary, within a language, there is a strong regularity in the form of words. As examples, in spoken languages words are units of speech, and in sign languages, they are man-ual patterns. The link between form and function here- e.g., between spoken words and naming-is so obvious to adults that it is easy to assume that infants begin the language learning game with this correspondence in mind. However, consider that the infant must ab-stract this regularity in the context of learning many things from and about the behavior of other people, many of them with reference to objects (the sounds they make, their typical uses, etc.). It may take in-fants some time to sort out the forms and functions of names for things. One-year-olds seem to understand a range of rela-tions between sounds and objects. For example, they may know that the sound of an airplane means that if they look up, they will see the airplane.They also seem to understand the relations between some words and their referents. According to one traditional model of language development, early on there is no distinc-tion between these two sorts of learning, in that they are both based on contiguity between the sound or word and the item. The work of Baldwin (Baldwin