How Do Children Learn What Words Mean?
How Children Come to Understand English Without Translating It into Japanese

Take the word dog, for example. Suppose the first dog a child encounters is a small white dog. Seeing that one dog alone, however, does not complete the meaning of dog. After that, the child meets many different dogs—a big dog, a black dog, a running dog, a sleeping dog, a dog in a photograph, a dog in a picture book, and so on.

Each of these one-by-one concrete experiences can be thought of as an exemplar . As children encounter many examples, they realize that features such as “white” and “small” are not essential to dog, while the traits shared by many different dogs gradually come into view.

During this process, children may sometimes make the meaning of a word too broad, and other times too narrow. A child who has learned doggie may call a goat doggie as well (overextension). On the other hand, a child may use doggie only for the family dog at home and not for another dog seen in the park (underextension).

These kinds of mistakes do not mean meaning-learning is failing. On the contrary, they show that the child is using limited experience to figure out how far doggie extends and to adjust the boundaries of the category. Meaning grows through repeated contact with concrete examples, and by gradually revising what a word refers to—sometimes too broadly, sometimes too narrowly along the way.

As experience grows, the doggie category becomes more stable. Goats and cats stop being treated as dog, while, at the same time, children come to recognize that a Chihuahua or a Saint Bernard is also a dog—even though each looks completely different from the family dog at home.

This is not just a matter of memorizing individual dogs one by one and matching them later. Instead, children build a category from the features many exemplars share, forming a rough sense of “this is what a dog is like.” The typical “dog-likeness” at the center of that category can be thought of as a prototype .

The same is true for the word bird. Sparrows and pigeons are easy to feel as “bird-like birds,” while penguins and ostriches may feel a little farther from the typical case. Even so, once enough experience accumulates, children understand that both still belong to bird. The meaning of a word is not built from a single definition such as “A is B.” It grows through experiencing many concrete examples, comparing similarities and differences, and gradually forming the center and the boundaries of a category.

Suppose a child encounters the word cup many times—in situations where they hold an actual cup, where they pour a drink into one, and in expressions such as a cup of tea. As they come across many different kinds of cups with different shapes, sizes, and materials, the range that cup refers to gradually expands and the category becomes more stable.

In this process, a Japanese translation is not necessarily required. That is because cup becomes directly connected to experience, situations, and the concept that grows out of those situations. In a first language, the moment a child hears the sound “dog,” a network of meaning comes alive—past dogs they have seen, their sense of dog-likeness, and what they know about dogs. They are not translating it into another language each time.

The same direction is possible in a second language. If the connection between English sounds or written forms and real experiences, situations, and mental images becomes strong enough, it becomes much easier to access meaning directly without going through Japanese.

Meaning is not completed by pairing one word with one experience alone. As a child’s vocabulary becomes richer, words also come to carry meaning through their relationships with other words.

Take the word dog. Its meaning is supported not only by experiences of seeing actual dogs, but also by repeated co-occurrence with words such as bark, puppy, pet, walk, tail, and cat. Hearing dog brings bark to mind; hearing cat can call up dog. These kinds of links between words are called word association.

With adjectives and adverbs, contrast is also an important clue for building meaning. Big becomes clearer in contrast with small, hot with cold, and fast with slow. Repeatedly experiencing contrasts such as big dog / small dog makes it easier to understand the range of meaning carried by a quality like “big.”

The meanings of content words are built not only through connections to real objects and situations, but also through relationships with similar words, related words, and opposite words.

Verbs often have a broader range of meaning than nouns, and many are hard to grasp in isolation. Even if a child learns take as “to take,” real English contains many expressions such as take a picture, take a bus, take your time, take care of, and take a break. It is difficult to understand all of these through a single Japanese equivalent.

However, when children are exposed to large amounts of English, they repeatedly experience which words take appears with. If they hear take a picture many times as a chunk, that whole expression begins to carry the meaning “take a photo.” The meaning of a verb is specified not only by its core dictionary sense, but also through patterns of co-occurrence—that is, through which words it is used with.

English contains not only words with relatively clear content, such as dog, run, and big, but also function words like the, a, of, to, for, in, have, and will. Because these words do not directly label objects or actions themselves, it is difficult to teach their meaning by pointing to something concrete. Instead, children learn from large numbers of examples where the words appear and what role they play inside sentences.

If children repeatedly hear expressions such as a dog, a book, and a car, they begin to notice that a often appears before a certain kind of noun. If they experience phrases such as in the box, in the room, and in the car, the relationship between in and location also gradually becomes visible.

Rather than evoking rich standalone images in the way content words do, function words primarily show relationships among words and help signal sentence structure. As children accumulate experience with how function words are used—not only content words—this later supports their understanding of word order, phrases, and constructions, which is to say, grammar.

“Understanding English directly in English” may sound like a special skill. In reality, it is something everyone already does naturally in their first language. The moment we hear a word, we do not recall a dictionary-style definition first. Instead, previously accumulated exemplars, categories, related words, opposites, collocations, and situations are activated together, and the meaning of that word comes alive.

With dog, for example, it is not just the category of dog that is activated, but also connections to words such as bark, pet, and puppy. With big, the contrast with small is involved. With take, collocations such as take a picture and take a bus are part of the meaning network. In this way, many different relationships overlap to form the meaning of a word.

The same direction is possible in a second language. If children encounter many real examples and the links among word and meaning, word and word, and word and situation become strong enough, they can move toward the same kind of understanding. To understand without translating into Japanese, children need a large amount of experience with English itself—enough to build up what words refer to, which other words they relate to, and which expressions they appear in.

Once they begin to see chunks of words and the role of function words as well, language learning moves beyond individual word meanings into the world of phrases, constructions, and grammar.