Children’s First Words

Onset and Rate

   1. Charlotte Buhler (1931) production data from 46 German children average age at first word was 0;10

   2. Madorah Smith (1926) studied 124 English-speaking children

   3. Helen Benedict (1979 JCL)

      A. Method: studied 8 children for 6 months; asked mothers to keep diaries

            i. Phase I: visited every other week for 6 months for 45-90 minutes

            ii. Phase II: continued until age 2;0 or MLU 1.10

            iii. scored the age at which a preset number of words were acquired

      B. Results

            i. Comprehension is four months ahead of production

            ii. The rate of acquisition for comprehension was faster than the rate for production

                  e.g., 2 weeks to acquire 10 words in comprehension

                          4 weeks to acquire 10 words in production

            iii. Rates of acquisition differ for individual subjects

                  Number of words

                  Rate for first 50 words (days/word)

General Semantic Categories

   1. Katherine Nelson (1973 Structure and Strategy in Learning to Talk)

      A. Method: studied the first 50 words of 18 children; asked mothers to keep diaries

      B. Divided the children’s words into 5 general categories

            i. Specific nominals: words that refer to only one exemplar of a category, e.g., ‘Daddy’

            ii. General nominals: words which refer to all members of a category, e.g., ‘this’

            iii. Action words: words that elicit or accompany actions of the child, e.g., ‘peekaboo’

            iv. Modifiers: words that refer to properties or qualities of things or events, e.g., ‘big’

            v. Personal-social: words that express affective states, e.g., ‘yes’, ‘want’, ‘bye-bye’

      C. Results

            i. early use of general nominals

            ii. over time the use of specific nominals decreases and general nominals increase

            iii. The children used two different strategies: expressive and referential

      D. Discussion

            i. Is the referential/expressive distinction real?

            ii. What might cause such a distinction?

                  a. performance differences–what do the children happen to enjoy doing

                  b. input–Nelson found evidence against this cause

                  c. linguistic variation–children focus on lexicon or pragmatics

      E. Benedict (1979) reported a different distribution in comprehension and production

F. Dedre Gentner (1982 ‘Why Nouns are Learned Before Verbs’ in S. Kuczaj (ed.) Language

              Development, Vol.2 Erlbaum.)

      . Natural Partitions Hypothesis: the category corresponding to nouns is, at its core, conceptually simpler or more basic than those corresponding to verbs and other predicates.

      Data

      Other Explanations:

            i. Word Order–Easier to remember the last words in sentences

            ii. Morphological Transparency–Nouns have fewer inflections

            iii. Input Frequency

Gentner & Boroditsky (2001) “One might suggest, then, that there is nothing to explain: children’s word distributions simply match those of adults, with many nouns and a few highly frequent relational words. But to say the patterns match does not provide a mechanism of learning.” (p. 232)

            iv. Patterns of Language Teaching–Kaluli and Chinese parents emphasize family names

Recent literature

P. Brown. (1998) Children’s first verbs in Tzeltal. Linguistics 36.715-753.

S. Choi & A. Gopnick. (1995) Early acquisition of verbs in Korean. JCL 22.497-529.

D. Gentner & L. Boroditsky. (2001) Individuation, relativity, and early word learning. In M. Bowerman & S. Levinson (eds), Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development. Cambridge.

L. de León. (1999) Verbs in Tzotzil early syntactic development. International Journal of Bilingualism 3.219-240.

C. Pye (1992) The acquisition of K’iche’ Maya. In D. Slobin (ed.), The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, Vol. 3, pp. 221-308. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

T. Tardif. (1996) Nouns are not always learned before verbs. Developmental Psychology 32.492-504.

Development of Lexical Meaning

   1. Children’s first words are restricted to limited contexts (Snyder, Bates & Betherington 1981)

      A. Analyzed contextual flexibility of 32 children’s first 50 words (mean age 1;1(7))

   2. Early words in Nelson’s (1973) study (Table 6.7)

   3. Semantic overextensions

      A. Braunwald (1978) kept a diary of her daughter Laura

      B. Vygotsky (1962) associative complex

      C. Rescorla (JCL 1980), Production

            1. Collected diary observations for the first 75 words in production for 6 children (1;0-1;6)

            2. Data: 6 subjects x 75 words = total of 455 words observed

            3. Children only overextended 149 words (33%!)

            4. Category differences: letters 100%, vehicles 76%, animals 28%

5. 12 words constitute 37% of overextensions: car, truck, shoe, hat, Dada, cheese, ball, cat, dog, hot

            6. Rescorla divided the overextensions into three types:

                  a. categorical (extended within a category) 55%, e.g. ‘Dada’- mother, ‘apple’- orange

                  b. analogical (no clear categorical relation) 19%, e.g. ‘hat’- basket on child’s head

                  c. predicative (word used as predicate for absent referent) 25%, e.g. ‘doll’ - doll place

            7. Overextensions continue through whole period (seven months)

                  11% 9% 24% 29% 28% 28% 24%

            8. Earliest acquired words were overextended the most

                  1-25    45%

                  26-50  35%

                  51-75  20% (due to shorter time to observe these words?)

            9. associative complexes account for 58 or 39% of overextensions (Table 6.9, p. 152)

                  ‘daddy’, ‘key’, ‘hot’, ‘mommy’, ‘hat’, ‘cheese’

      D. Explanation of children’s semantic extensions

            1. Children have incomplete linguistic sign (Piaget 1948)

                  a. children only overextend a small percentage of their first words (33%)

                  b. older children continue to overextend words

c. word spurt occurs in comprehension before production providing evidence that children have acquired full symbolic reference

d. definition of incomplete linguistic sign is circular; it refers to how children use words

            2. Incomplete Semantic System - children lack adult system of semantic contrasts

            3. Limited Vocabulary - children only overextend words in production

            4. Retrieval Problem - children tend to overextend words acquired earlier/retrieved faster

5. Phonological Simplicity - children favor words with known sounds (Schwartz & Leonard 1982)

            6. All of the above?