Input Processing in Conceptual Semantics
Susanne Elizabeth Carroll, Lindsay Hracs · 2024
Despite the role meanings play in the discovery of morphemes and words, and in abstracting word classes from recurrent distributional patterns of individual word forms in sentences, theories of second language acquisition (SLA) are remarkably vague as to what they assume ‘meanings’ are and how they are made use of developmentally. We explore a unifying approach to SLA, acknowledging the relevance of learning processes as proposed by cognitive psychology (associative, distributional, and statistical learning, category abstraction and category differentiation), but with an emphasis on the nature of mental representations as informed by linguistic theories. In what follows, we explore the potential theoretical contributions of Conceptual Semantics to how first exposure learners of an L2 infer ontological conceptual categories from visual stimuli and then map these to nouns and sub-classes of nouns expressing the grammatical category of Number and its semantic correlates.