Lexical-semantic representation of body parts in Serbian child language

Abstract

Although words for human body parts appear early in children's vocabulary, relatively little is known about the conceptual and semantic development related to the body part words in preschool and early school ages. In this paper, we examine how children at ages 5, 7 and 9 use words and expressions to refer to the human body and its parts, and how these correspond to the segmentation and lexicalization of the body part terms in adults. Participants were asked to name the body parts that were depicted in the drawings showing the whole body (front or back) and the face, with a red dot marking the specific part. The results of the comparison between children and adults indicate that for the most parts of arms, legs, and face there is a gradual conceptual segmentation of body with age, reflected in a decrease in the use of holonyms and an increase in the use of meronyms in naming parts. However, such hierarchical organization could not be confirmed for other parts (trunk, shoulders, neck, head, some parts of the face), revealing different pathways in the acquisition of words. Children of all ages, especially 7and 9-year-olds, seek alternative solutions for naming the body parts for which labels are missing in their vocabulary. In such cases, they name adjacent body parts, internal organs, and parts of the skeleton, or use prepositional phrases to refer to the surrounding areas. The results are compared with the findings of the previous studies, while the lexical-semantic change in the body parts terms and the hierarchical organization of the body part lexicon in child language are discussed. The results were compared in light of previous findings of the developmental studies, on the lexical-semantic change, and the hierarchical organization of the body part lexicon in child language.