Decrements in Children's Responses to Big and Tall

A Reconsideration of the Potential Cognitive and Semantic Causes

Abstract

The potential causes of decrements in children's understanding of big and tall (Maratsos, 1973, 1974) are reconsidered. Five hypotheses are examined in detail. Two of them, the strong cognitive hypothesis and the strong semantic hypothesis, offer the most viable explanations for the decrements, but it is impossible to choose between them on the basis of the evidence presently available. However, it is argued that one type of evidence would prove instrumental in choosing between the two hypotheses: data on the acquisition of spatial adjectives in other languages. The implications that such evidence would have for the acquisition of word meaning in general are discussed.