‘This man's father is my father's son’: a study of the acquisition of English kin terms
- 1 May 1974
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Journal of Child Language
- Vol. 1 (1) , 23-47
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000900000064
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.Keywords
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