Learning strategies for polysemous words by Chinese children
Fu Jin · 2010
Theoretically,there are two ways for children to acquire polysemous words:one is the derivational strategy,with which the acquisition order correlates with the derivational process of the word meanings; the other is the independent strategy,which means that meaning acquisition by children is independent of derivation. Based on an exhaustive statistical survey,this paper proposes a variety of strategies for learning polysemous words. It assumes that the children tend to use the derivational strategy to acquire different meanings without other motivations. However,when affected by some functional motivations such as high frequency of occurrence,the children show no tendency to observe the cognitive principles. Furthermore,the relations among the different meanings also intervene in the acquisition order.