Naming of the human body parts in Serbian: A development perspective

Abstract

The human body is an object and a medium of the earliest perceptual, physical and social experience of human beings. The question addressed here was how the semantic differentiation in language unfolds in the course of language acquisition: what are the commonalities and differences between children and adults in categorization and naming of body parts. The participants were given 90 drawings of body parts to name (material developed by Jordan et al., 2009). The frequency and variety of responses were statistically compared across age levels (5‐, 7-, 9-year‐olds and adults). In addition, the usage of conventional lexemes, and the usage of holonyms/meronyms for particular body parts were explored. The analysis revealed that the average number of different responses increased with age (F/3,86/=13.477; p<0.01), as well as the average number of lexicalized responses per participant (F/3,86/=31.615; p<0.01), indicating a developmental trajectory in the conventional usage of lexicon. Since the stimuli were susceptible to multiple naming, most of the stimuli triggered more than one correct response (e.g. 'arm'/'upper‐arm'/'above the elbow' for the marked upper‐arm). Hence, the stimuli were sorted into four groups according to the number of triggered responses (1, 2, 3-6 and 7-12 responses), which revealed significantly different distributions across the age levels (X2/9/=17,11; N=360, p=0.047). The findings reveal that Serbian children and adults differ in the naming of body parts – children production is less differentiated. Adults are rather specific and tend to use meronymic term, while young children use holonyms for the same reference (e.g. 'knee' vs. 'leg', 'fingers' vs. 'hand'). Before the target meronymic lexicalization is fully accomplished, the children opt for descriptive prepositional responses that are semantically correct but not fully conventional. These findings suggest that development in this semantic domain is laid in two processes: differentiation in the lexical meaning, and acquisition of conventionality.

Jordan, F., Dunn, M. and Majid, A. (2009). Body part naming booklet. Developed for the EoSS project. Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen.