A tulajdonnevek a gyermeki nyelvelsajátításban

Absztrakt

Proper names in children’s language acquisition  

The majority of onomastic research centres around the proper names of adults. Works on general name theory contain a few hypotheses in connection with the acquisition of the first proper names. The first section of the paper overviews the results achieved by the research of children’s language acquisition with respect to acquiring personal names. The acquisition of other name types, such as place names is a much longer process, which has not been examined in depth by either psychology or onomastics to date. Psychological research focuses on spatial orientation, the cerebral localization of space-related information, the linguistic representation of spatial relations and the childhood development of these capacities. Factors, such as how wider geographical surroundings are divided, or how place names are acquired by children are not examined thoroughly. To gain insight into the initial phases of these processes, the author follows their development in two infants’ knowledge of place names. The early meanings of place names are typically not fully generalized: the name of a town or a street is understood and used by the infants to refer to a house. At this age, infants connect place names to specific persons. In infants, the concept of places (what is a town?, what is a street?) is not completely formed, this leads to semantic discrepancies. For them, spatial elements are not the individual entities of their surroundings. Besides the peculiarities of the earliest appearance of place names, the paper also observes the early use of geographical common nouns and the development of spatial orientation.