Cognitive Categorization And Children's Semantic Acquisition Of Nouns

This thesis presents a theoretical study on children's semantic acquisition of nouns from the aspect of cognitive categorization. In our study we examined several Chinese children's acquisition of kinship terms and object-denoting nouns, analyzed the acquisition mechanism within Piaget's theory of assimilation and accommodation, and discussed some related theoretical issues at the end. We find that children's semantic acquisition is achieved through two successive processes:the formation of prototypes and the typification of prototypes. The first process is based on the development of children's perceptive and categorization abilities which enable them to distinguish between entities and link their characteristics with certain meaning. In the latter process, children transfer the denotational range of an acquired word, match a new object to the prototype of it, make estimations and re-match other objects to the prototype. Through constant adjustments to the properties of the prototypes, children gradually put the entities under different nouns'denotational range and acquire the categorical meanings of words.