What is semantic development?

Semantic development explains how children
acquire new words and successfully attach meaning to them. This process begins before children
can even speak, as they are immersed in the language of the culture in which they are born.
Gradually, children begin to imitate some of these words they have repetitively heard which have
an especially significant meaning for them, typically beginning with the names of their
caregivers and requests for food.

As they practice more, they begin to make
connections to other words in their environment, often beginning with concrete nouns and visual
verbs and then branching out to modifiers for those words.

Even within common
nouns, children must learn various categories and usages of language. For example, a child may
learn the word cow by looking at a picture in a book. She must then learn
that the same visual image she passes in a field on her way to Nana's is also a
cow. She then learns that cows can look different: some are all brown, some
are black and white, others are solid black. But they all belong to the idea of
cow. Another child who lives on a farm might learn that her cow Bessie can
be categorized by the name Bessie, by the word cow, by
the classification of animal, and by the word pet.
Thus, semantic development includes how language is ordered and how children not only develop
singular words for ideas but how they begin to develop an organizational system for all those
words with various shades of meaning.

Semantic development relies heavily on
a larger social context for each child and varies depending on environmental influences and
supports, the intellectual abilities of the child, and the specific linguistic abilities she is
capable of performing.