The Influence of Theory of Mind on Lexical Acquisition

The dominant theory of lexical acquisition for much of the twentieth century was that of associative learning. This trend was certainly driven by the dominance of behaviorism in psychology, but also by its cousin philosophical behaviorism that pervaded the fields of philosophy of language and linguistics. However, there is also good evidence that children are not “little behaviorists.” Most of the associative theories of word learning break down because they are forced to rely almost solely on naming by ostension. However, there are a great many things that cannot be demonstrated, yet children nonetheless learn the words for them (see Bloom, 2000, p.59 for examples of these categories). So what is going on here? The alternative view to associationism has its roots in the philosophy of Augustine. On this approach, which I will call the theory of mind approach, children use some sort of naive psychology to guess what people are referring to when they are speaking. To do this, the child seems to track the attention of others. Once they see where that attention is focused when the person uses a word, the child can then infer that the word is the label for that that focus. While this line of thought was ridiculed by many analytic philosophers in the twentieth century, more recent work has shown that there may be more to this view than was previously assumed. In other words, there seems to be more and more compelling evidence that even prelinguistic children can “already think, only not yet speak” (Bloom, 2000, p.61). In principle, the sort of attention-tracking discussed here would not necessarily have to be “seeing” in a literal sense. Many topics of conversation can be abstract, either because they involve