1 Language Development: The View from the Radical Middle

Words are the conceptual building blocks of language. Despite over a millennium of discussion from Plato’s Cratylus to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to Brown’s Names for Things, however, we have yet to understand how we map words to world. This paper examines the question anew by focusing on how children learn their first words and come to imbue them with meaning. Do children link the words they hear to the most perceptually salient features of the environment? Do they “read ” social cues from master word users who guide them toward the correct referent? Or might an understanding of word meaning be scaffolded by attention to grammatical information, serving to refine the way words represent objects, actions and events? An abundant body of literature can be marshaled to support each of these possibilities. Over the past 15 years, however, there is emerging consensus that the process of word learning will not be best described through deference to one approach or the other. Rather, it will require a comprehensive theory that unites perceptual, social and linguistic information in the service of word learning. Bloom (1993) wrote, “cognitive developments bring the infant to the threshold of language only in conjunction with other developments in expression and social connectedness ” (p. 52). Woodward and Markman (1998) echoed, “word learning depends on an ability to recruit and integrate information from