The contrastive hypothesis for the acquisition of word meaning: a reconsideration of the theory

Abstract

The evidence for the Contrastive Hypothesis (Clark 1980, 1983a, b, 1987, Barrett 1978, 1982) is reviewed. An examination of data from the acquisition of object words, relational words and superordinate terms reveals little support for this hypothesis that young children automatically assume that every two words in their lexicons contrast. Further, theoretical problems with the positions that children assign words to semantic fields as they are acquiring them and that innovations are used to fill lexical gaps make these stances untenable.