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‘This man's father is my father's son’: a study of the acquisition of English kin terms*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Susan E. Haviland  and
Eve V. Clark
Susan E. Haviland
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and Committee on Linguistics, Stanford University
Eve V. Clark
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and Committee on Linguistics, Stanford University
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Abstract

Clark's (1973) hypothesis about the acquisition of semantics proposed that young children learn the meanings of words component by component, and that, within any given semantic field, they acquire the full adult meanings for the semantically simpler terms before they acquire the semantically more complex ones. The semantic field investigated in the present study was that of kinship terms. A new analysis of kin terms, employing relational components, was used to predict the relative order of acquisition of the terms. Definitions of 15 kin terms were elicited from children aged 3;5–8;10. The data showed that semantic complexity played an important role in determining the order of acquisition, and thus provided support for both the relational analysis of kin terms and the semantic acquisition hypothesis.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , May 1974 , pp. 23 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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Footnotes

*

A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the Conference on Kinship Semantics, sponsored by the Mathematical Social Sciences Board, and organized by Hugh Gladwin and David B. Kronenfeld, at Riverside, California, on 18–20 December 1972. This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (GS-30040) and in part by the National Institute of Mental Health (MH-20021). We would like to thank Herbert H. Clark and Michelle Z. Rosaldo for their comments on an earlier version of this paper, and we are grateful to Pamela Frydman for her assistance with some of the data analysis.

References

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