- Professor Mutsumi Imai
Introduction of the discussion
When teaching words to infants, even if it is a basic word such as “apple” or “blue”, it is difficult to explain the meaning by using words. The child has no choice but to guess the meaning of the word from the clues in the situation.
It is well understood that when children are given only one or a few limited cases of words, they focus only on shapes, and immediately infer the meaning of the words by ignoring colors, materials, textures, similarity of part.
However, the meaning of words cannot be determined by individual words alone. For example, in order to know the meaning of “red”, it is necessary to know adjacent words such as “pink”, “purple”, and “orange”, and to know where each “red” has a boundary.
Language learning may seem like system learning. However, in language learning, it is necessary to construct a system from the bottom up by learning the elements, without understanding the overall picture.
Finding the problem
Then, how do infants learn the meaning of words and learn words?
Argument
In a study on how children’s use of color names progresses, it has gradually become clear that a 3-year-old child already knows most of the basic words, but the boundaries of each word are not organized, and for example color names are too widely used to distinguish the difference between adjacent colors, and that the acquisition of the ranges of color names seems to have gradually progressed until the age of five, and the excessive wide use of words seems to be constrained by perceptual similarity.
In other words, it is considered that the children first distinguish colors at an abstract level, and when a new word is learned, the boundary between the new word and a known word may be readjusted.
Conclusion
Therefore, I would like to explore how a child come to organize the meaning of similar words and learn the correct meaning of similar words that belong to the same semantic domain.
Examining the conclusion
By studying with Professor Mutsumi Imai, who is studying language learning mechanisms, I am sure that I could obtain various perspectives regarding my research and it would open up new horizons for me.
Therefore, I believe that Keio University’s Faculty of Environment and Information Studies is the most suitable place for pursuing my research and social contributions, and I am aspiring to enter your school and study in your laboratory.
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