Innateness, abstract names, and syntactic cues in How Children Learn the Meanings of Words.
Bloom masterfully captures the state-of-the-art in the study of lexical acquisition. He also exposes the extent of our ignorance about the learning of names for non-observables. HCLMW adopts an innatist position without adopting modularity of mind; however, it seems likely that modularity is needed to bridge the gap between object names and the rest of the lexicon.
Harley
Heidi
H
Department of Linguistics, Douglass 200E, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0028 hharley@u.arizona.edu http://w3.arizona.edu/~ling/hh.
Piattelli-Palmarini
Massimo
M