TEXT 2

“Children learn, on average, ten to fifteen new word meanings each day, but only one of these words can be accounted for by direct instruction. The other nine to fourteen word meanings need to be picked up in some other way. It has been proposed that children picked up acquire these meanings with the use of processes modeled by latent semantic analysis; that is, when they meet an unfamiliar word, unfamiliar children can use information in its context to correctly guess its rough area of meaning. A child may expand the meaning and use of certain words that are already part of its mental lexicon in order to denominate anything that is somehow related but for which it does not know the specific words yet. For instance, a child may broaden the use of mummy and dada in order to indicate anything that mummy dada belongs to its mother or father, or perhaps every person who resembles its own parents, or say rain while meaning I don't want to go out.”

(Adapted from: Language Acquisition https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/35237)