This document chronicles this author's attempt to explore how words come to mean what they do, with a particular focus on child language acquisition and what that means for models of language understanding.\footnote{I say \emph{historical} because I synthesize the ideas based on when I discovered them and how those ideas influenced my later thinking.} I explain the setting for child language learning, how embodiment -- being able to perceive and enact in the world, including knowledge of concrete and abstract concepts -- is crucial, and how emotion and cognition relate to each other and the language learning process. I end with what I think are some of the requirements for a language-learning agent that learns language in a setting similar to that of children. This paper can act as a potential guide for ongoing and future work in modeling language.

翻译：本文记录了作者探索词语如何获得其含义的尝试，特别关注儿童语言习得及其对语言理解模型的意义。\footnote{我称之为“历史性”是因为我根据自己发现这些观点的时序以及它们如何影响我后来的思考来综合这些想法。}我阐述了儿童语言学习的背景，解释了具身性——即能够感知并在世界中行动，包括对具体和抽象概念的认知——如何至关重要，以及情感与认知如何相互关联并影响语言学习过程。最后，我提出了我认为语言学习智能体在类似儿童的环境下学习语言所需的一些条件。本文可作为当前及未来语言建模工作的潜在指南。