Meaning Below is an outline of my plan for the meaning section of this article The question of meaning or the mapping problem In word learning the mapping problem refers to the question of how infants attach the forms of language to the things that they experience in the world Golinkoff R M Hirsh Pasek K Bloom L Smith L B Woordward A L Akhtar N Hollich G 2000 Becoming a word learner A debate on lexical acquisition New York Oxford University Press There are infinite objects concepts and actions in the world that words could be mapped onto So how does the language learner successfully complete the word mapping process Several answers to this question have been explored Some theorists believe that children have built in constraints that help them to map words onto concepts in the world Clark E V 2009 Lexical meaning In E L Bavin Ed The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language pp 283 300 New York Cambridge University Press Social pragmatic theories propose that caregivers act as experts in order to assist children in the word mapping process Domain general views as well as an emergentist coalition model have also been proposed to account for the way that children map meaning onto words Theories of constraints General overview of theories Mutual Exclusivity ME Here I will discuss the ways in which the ME bias might influence children s word learning including the disambiguation effect the correction effect the rejection effect and the restriction effect Merriman W E Bowman L L 1989 The mutual exclusivity bias in children s word learning Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 54 3 4 Serial No 220 I will also discuss three confliction positions in the literature regarding the ME bias that children are biased from the start that children are never biased and that children acquire the ME bias during early childhood Properties and relations In this section I will discuss the attention that children pay to properties and relations and in particular to the shape of objects Clark E V 1993 The lexicon in acquisition New York Cambridge University Press Whole Object Assumptions The literature suggests that children are most likely to apply a label to a whole object as opposed to a part or property of the whole Taxonomic Assumptions Children assume that labels pick out categories of objects rather than those objects and the things that are related to them Social pragmatic theories This branch of theories argues that the caregiver s gaze body language gesture and smile might help infants acquire clues from context in order to understand the meaning of a word While the main emphasis is usually placed on the role of adults in guiding the meaning making process some theorists have suggested that the child also plays an important role in this interaction Joint Attention The literature suggests that joint attention is an important mechanism through which children learn to map words to world and vice versa Pragmatic Assumptions Children may adopt some of the same pragmatic assumptions that adults have in order to learn the meaning of words I will discuss two examples of these assumptions conventionality and contrast here Domain General Views This view argues that children do not need principles or constraints in order to successfully develop word world mappings Instead children notice the objects actions or events that are most salient in context and then associate them with the words that are most frequently used in their presence Emergentist Coalition Model Children map novel labels to novel objects using a variety of cues in their environment Different cues will come to be utilized by infants as they progress along the path of world learning Summary Here I will suggest that the field reflects controversial perspectives on how children map meaning onto real world events objects and actions References