A WORLD OF RELATIONS Relational Words

Children climb on jungle gyms, run around trees, and kiss their parents. The everyday world in which we live is fundamentally dynamic, with events defined in terms of the relations that objects have to actions. When we label these events and relations, we use relational words that come in all forms. They can be nouns such as brother, island, and passenger (Hall & Waxman, 1993; Keil & Batterman, 1984; Maguire, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2006) or more prototypical verbs and prepositions such as climb, run, on, and around, each of which cannot be defined without specifying the referent in relationship to another object. For example, the verb climb refers to the relationship between an agent and something being ascended, and words such as on and around are defined by a ground object. Importantly, understanding these relational terms is not only central to a complete theory of language, but is also the key to understanding how children link words and grammar (Lidz, 2006). Until recently, we knew little about when and how children acquire any relational terms (see Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 2006, for a review). This chapter examines how children learn relational terms through the lens of verbs and prepositions. After reviewing evidence that verbs and prepositions are particularly difficult to learn, we examine several hypotheses to explain this disparity. We conclude that although children have the foundations necessary to learn these words, they have trouble mapping relational words to their referents.