Constraints on Word Learning: Speculations About Their Nature, Origins, and Domain Specificity

Word learning is an inductive feat accomplished by the 2-year-olds of our species. To explain how such young children with limited information-processing abilities can so readily figure out what words mean, investigators have hypothesized that children are predisposed to elevate some hypotheses about word meanings over others. By greatly reducing the hypothesis space, these constraints on hypotheses help render the inductive problem soluble. Although the focus of this chapter is on three specific word-learning constraints: the whole-object, taxonomic, and mutual exclusivity assumptions, my goal is to consider broader fundamental questions about the nature of constraints on learning.