WHAT DO PEOPLE SAY AFTER THEY HAVE LEARNED HOW TO TALK? STUDIES OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF REFERENTIAL COMMUNICATION1
Sam Glucksberg, Robert M. Kkauss · 2016
What do people say when they talk to one another, and what deter mines their choice of words? If language were code, such that each ob ject, event, or relationship referred to had unique name, then the problem of choosing word or utterance would be reduced to determining the particular associations between referents, the things referred to, and their names. This, however, is not so. Referents (i.e., objects, events or relations) and their names do not have simple one-to-one correspondences. A referent may be referred to with any one of number of different names and single name may refer to any one of number of referents. As Rosenberg and Cohen (1966) have pointed out, the correct name for referent in one context may be incorrect in another. Thus, the attribute correct is used here to indicate that particular name is useful in talking about referent; it enables listener to understand speaker in given context. In general, listener is said to understand speaker if he can correctly discriminate the referent from set of nonreferents on the basis of mes sage supplied by the speaker. For example, if particular bird is the referent, then it may be called a pigeon, a ring dove, streptopelia