Children as little linguists

Language represents an intriguing and challenging topic, having fascinated mankind since its dawn. In the current study, our aim is to show the shortcomings of classical single-factor/unilateral theories of word learning, lexical acquisition, and language development that, generally tend to restrict these processes to single causes, constraints, factors or principles. Such theories imply a unilateral, linear growth pathway of language learning, acquisition, and development. Participants were 128 Moroccan children, 71 boys and 57 girls, aged between 4 and 12 years, all belonging to the social middle class. They lived in Taza city, capital of Taza province, a city in northern Morocco, 120 kilometers east of Fez, with a population of approximately 300,000 citizens, and surrounded by the Rif and Middle Atlas mountains. They were exposed to the two tasks, namely to the task of distinguishing between the appearance and the reality of a word and to the "False Belief Task on Word-Concept". We borrowed both tasks from the theory of mind and tried to adapt them to the field of linguistics, aiming at discovering the child's ability to distinguish between the signifier as an acousticlinguistic reality, the signified as a mental entity and the reference as a physical/material entity. Findings of the current study support the pluralistic mentalist word theory.