The distinctions between red and yellow or arm and hand may seem self-evident to English speakers, but they are not: Languages differ in the named distinctions they make. To help understand what constrains word meaning and how variation arises, we examined name choices in English, Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese for 36 instances of human locomotion. Naming patterns showed commonalities largely interpretable in terms of perceived physical similarities among the instances. There was no evidence for languages jointly ignoring salient physical distinctions to build meaning on other bases, nor for a shift in the basis of word meanings between parts of the domain of more vs. less importance to everyday life. Overall, the languages differed most notably in how many named distinctions they made, a form of variation that may be linked to linguistic typology. These findings, considered along with naming patterns from other domains, suggest recurring principles of constraint and variation across domains. © 2013 Elsevier Inc.

The meaning of a word is not acquired in isolation from other words. This article investigates how first-language (L1) and adult second-language (L2) learners of Chinese learn the meanings of verbs belonging to the same semantic domain, focusing on the semantic domain of "carrying/holding" in Chinese. Results revealed that the verb use of L2 adults is heavily influenced by their lexical knowledge of L1 and that their development of word meanings stops before they fully reach the adult native speakers' word meaning. L1 children in contrast tend to depend on perceptually visible features of actions at the initial stage of lexical acquisition and then gradually learn how their L1 categorizes the actions by verbs. We argue that L2 learners need to attain meta-knowledge about the mapping of the entire configuration of the corresponding lexical domain between L1 and L2 and discuss how reading inside and outside of the classroom could foster this process. © 2013 Copyright 2013 Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.

This paper explores the process through which children sort out the relations among verbs belonging to the same semantic domain. Using a set of Chinese verbs denoting a range of action events that are labeled by carrying or holding in English as a test case, we looked at how Chinese-speaking 3-, 5-, and 7-year-olds and adults apply 13 different verbs to a range of carrying/holding events. We asked how children learning Chinese originally divide and label the semantic space in this domain, how they discover the boundaries between different words, and how the meanings of verbs in the domain as a whole evolve toward the representations of adults. We also addressed the question of what factors make verb meaning acquisition easy or hard. Results showed that the pattern of children's verb use is largely different from that of adults and that it takes a long time for children to be able to use all verbs in this domain in the way adults do. We also found that children start to use broad-covering and frequent verbs the earliest, but use of these verbs tends to converge on adult use more slowly because children could not use these verbs as adults did until they had identified boundaries between these verbs and other near-synonyms with more specific meanings. This research highlights the importance of systematic investigation of words that belong to the same domain as a whole, examining how word meanings in a domain develop as parts of a connected system, instead of examining each word on its own: learning the meaning of a verb invites restructuring of the meanings of related, neighboring verbs. © 2010 Elsevier B.V.