Abstract
Some recent findings concerning the early acquisition of word meaning are reviewed. It is argued that these findings can best be interpreted by postulating that the very young child uses scripts in order to mentally represent events in his environment. The development of word meaning is then viewed as occurring through the partitioning of these scripts by the child into their constituent elements, with the prototypes that are disembedded from these scripts providing the ontogenetic source of the meanings of object names.
1. This is a revised version of a paper which was presented at the British Psychological Society Developmental Section Annual Conferences, Durham, September 1982, under the title The Study of Early Lexical Development: A Critical Review.