The Intentionality of Word Learning: How to Learn a Word, Any Word1

Children learn language to share their beliefs, desires, and feelings through acts of expression and to share the contents of minds of other persons through acts of interpretation. Intentionality is central, therefore, for language and for acquiring language. Principles of relevance, discrepancy, and elaboration explain the dialectic transactions between a child's states of mind and the external social and physical contexts in which language is discovered by the child for learning. Invoking a child's intentionality in a model of language development places the essential agency of the child at the center of the developmental process and locates language within a nexus of developments in cognition, emotion, and social connectedness. The central force in word learning is the mind of the child and its development rather than external mechanisms such as the social context, neural networks, or lexically specific constraints, principles, and biases. Early language is a succession of transformations of the adult target language by the child, under the child's control. The child's agency and directionality towards the target language apply to both its lexicon and grammar together in the course of acquisition, and the one is not learned apart from the other. Moreover, the acquisition of language is, itself, embedded in other cognitive, social, and emotional developments happening at the same time. Efforts to explain word learning, therefore, must involve broad principles that account for both developmental process as well as change in behaviors over time. I have proposed three such principles as explanatory concepts that focus on the agency and action of the child as mechanism (Bloom, 1993, 1997). These principles describe the momentto-moment adjustments between a child’s intentional states in consciousness and the child's perceptions of changing circumstances in the context−adjustments that are required for all development. Here, these principles are applied to language development, in general, and word learning, in particular. According to the principle of relevance, language learning is enhanced when the words a child hears bear upon and are pertinent to the objects of engagement, interest, and feelings. Relevance is determined by the things children care about in the real world and provides the direction for word learning, determining the words children say and understand and, thereby, the words they learn. Relevance "is the single property that makes information worth processing" (Sperber and Wilson, 1986, p. 46).2 Support for the research cited in this paper was provided by research grants from the National Science Foundation (BSB-8519665), the Spencer Foundation, and Teachers College, Columbia University. 2 In the 1995 edition of their book, Sperber and Wilson make clear that their original intent was to highlight a "communicative" principle rather than a "cognitive" principle, and they distinguish between the two kinds of principles (see, especially, p. 271, ff). Neither reading of their principle of relevance, however, has to do with learning, with children, with acquisition, or with development. Instead, their principle of relevance is a theory of how "every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance"; it is explicitly a "pragmatic" principle having to do with the special connections between ostensive communicative signals and language. The principle of relevance I have proposed for word learning (and language learning more generally) (Bloom, 1993 and elsewhere) is a cognitive principle that has pragmatic (and other) consequences for how children acquire language. The principle of relevance proposed here incorporates Sperber & Wilson's notion of relevance as the "single property that makes information worth processing" but it is not the same principle of relevance they proposed.