2000 Chapters (Layout Features)

The Intentionality of Word Learning: How to Learn a Word, Any Word

Bloom, Lois

Children learn language to share their beliefs, desires, and feelings through acts of expression and to share the contents of minds of other persons through acts of interpretation. Intentionality is central, therefore, for language and for acquiring language. Principles of relevance, discrepancy, and elaboration explain the dialectic transactions between a child's states of mind and the external social and physical contexts in which language is discovered by the child for learning. Invoking a child's intentionality in a model of language development places the essential agency of the child at the center of the developmental process and locates language within a nexus of developments in cognition, emotion, and social connectedness.