Abstract This paper represents a foray into the largely unexplored territory of the cognition of semantic approximations in first language acquisition. Current advances on cognitive modelling are applied to a corpus of 500 semantic approximations produced by 20 children between 1;06 and 5;00 years old. The results reveal that a large number of those semantic approximations are the output of a set of cognitive operations including those of comparison and correlation (i.e. metaphorical projections), domain expansion and reduction (i.e. metonymic mappings), and mitigation and strengthening (i.e. scalar operations). Far for being an impediment to communication, most semantic approximations in our data are found to help children capitalize on their incomplete lexical pool, maximizing its communicative potential. The set of cognitive strategies involved is available from an early age, underlying the use of language throughout our lifespan, and adapting its functions to diverse communicative needs in different stages of our lives.

中文翻译：

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单语英语儿童语义近似的认知方法

摘要本文代表了对在第一语言习得中对语义近似的认知的一个尚未探索的领域的尝试。认知建模的最新进展已应用于20个1； 06至5：00岁儿童产生的500个语义近似语料库。结果表明，大量的语义近似是一组认知操作的输出，包括比较和相关（即隐喻投影），域扩展和归约（即转喻映射）以及缓解和加强（即标量操作） ）。远不是阻碍交流的，我们的数据中大多数语义近似都可以帮助孩子利用他们不完整的词汇池，从而最大程度地发挥其交流潜力。