A gradualist view of word meaning in language acquisition and language use

Abstract

For both children and adults, communicating with each other effectively depends on having enough knowledge about particular entities, actions, or relations to understand and produce the words being used. Speakers draw on conventional meanings shared with their interlocutors, but do they share every detail of word meaning? They need not have identical, or fully specified, representations for the meanings of all the terms they make use of. Rather, they need only have represented enough about the meanings of the words used by another speaker to understand what is intended in context on a particular occasion. Reliance on partial meanings is common in both children and adults. More detailed, shared, representations of word meanings for a domain depend on acquiring additional knowledge about that domain and its contents.