Learning the Meaning of Nouns and Verbs. A Comparison from an Emergentist Perspective

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Other, grade: 1,0, University of Cologne (Englisches Seminar II), language: English, abstract: This essay, which will be focusing on the psychological processes involved in learning the meaning of nouns and verbs will be based entirely on books and articles representing the emergentist/constructivist approach. Especially, for the part on learning nouns, an emergentist model called The Emergentist Coalition Model, developed and described by George Hollich, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff (2000), will stand in the focus. It regards early word learning as a process of incremental knowledge construction, where each step on this path changes or reshapes the child¿s cognitive system and provides it with new equipment for the task of further word learning. The second part, dealing with the acquisition of verbs, is based primarily on texts by Ewa Dabrowska (2009) and Gilette et al. (1999), which treat word learning cross-categorically, focusing on properties of words beyond the category level, especially their concreteness, imageability and their semantic and syntactic properties.

Finally, some suggestions will be made as to how the psycholinguistic insights presented so far can be put to use in school, in service of second language teaching.