Exam 2: Ch. 7-9 Flashcards
Initial Lexicons: Structure & Phonemic Properties
Structure: 50+% consist of a single CV syllable with the remainder split between single vowels and two CV syllables (CVCV)
Phonemic Properties: front and back consonants predominate; no consonant clusters present
3 Typical Categories of a Child’s Early Lexicon
1) animals
2) foods
3) toys
Early Lexicon Growth
initially is slow and may appear to plateau for short periods;
child’s lexicon has a small core of high-usage words;
vocabulary (especially receptive) “spurt” between 18-24 months
First 50 Words
acquired by 18 months of age;
nouns predominate–over 60% of lexicon consists of nouns;
most entries are people/animals in child’s environment or objects the child can manipulate;
not all noun types are represented–no collections or abstractions
timing of “vocabulary spurt”
cause of and reason for timing is unknown, but may be related to:
(1) development of more articulation control
(2) the role of syntactic patterns–syntactic frames that child can “fill”
(3) underlying growth in cognitive capacities
(4) learning and using words
cause of “vocabulary spurt”
pairing of the semantic learning with quickly developing phonological advances, a system of syntactic patterns, or cognitive advances
explanations for the early predominance of nouns:
- child may already have the concept of objects
- nouns are perceptually/conceptually distinct–represent concrete “things”
- linguistic predictability makes nouns easier to use (nouns = things, things relate to each other/other words in specific ways)
- higher frequency of adult use
- location at the end of adult utterances for emphasis
- fewer morphological adaptations than other parts of speech
- mothers prompt children to produce nouns more frequently
- more frequent in toy play and short maternal utterances
vocabulary development may consist of a process of…
…continually fine-tuning lexical/vocabulary system in order to increase storage and accessibility to information
the lexical system is enhanced through _______.
use
verbs are more frequent in…
- non-toy (social) play
* conversations
individual children have either ______ style or ______ style.
- referential
* expressive
referential style
- “noun lovers”
- use many nouns
- tend to elaborate the noun/noun phrase of sentences
- seem to have more adult contacts, use more single words, and employ an analytic (bottom-up) strategy to build longer utterances from individual words
expressive style
- “noun leavers”
- use few nouns, prefer interactional and functional words
- tend to elaborate on verb/verb phrase of their sentences
- seem to have more peer contacts, attempt to produce longer utterances, and employ a holistic (top-down) strategy to break longer utterances up into their parts
holistic acquisition of adult expressions
- “swallowing language whole”
- acquiring multi-word expressions as if they were single-word expressions, unaware of the smaller units of meaning
- example: “I-wanna-do-it”
modifiers and verb-like words (such as “down”) appear…
…soon after the first word
true verbs
(ex: “eat” and “play”)
appear after modifiers and verb-like words
relational function of verbs
bring together items or events
unlike nouns, verbs…
(1) are not permanent
(2) may not be accompanied by any consistent maternal gesturing
challenges in learning a verb
(1) to establish meaning, child must find underlying concept; concepts of verbs are abstract and hard to determine from the physical environment
(2) some describe momentary actions, others have more duration
(3) some nouns can be verbs
(4) child must be able to identify verb in the speech stream
as many as 60% of the verbs in maternal speech refer to…
…future action
with _____ growth and the emergence of _____, the proportion of _____ increases substantially.
- vocabulary
- grammar
- verbs
early lexicons until about 18 months of age seem to follow a principle of…
…mutual exclusivity (if the word means X, it can’t mean Y or Z)
2 processes used by children to form internal representations
(1) context-bound symbols, attached to a certain event and only used in that context
(2) words used to designate entities, actions, and relationships in several contexts
word learning is unlike most other kinds of learning; much of human learning is _____, meaning…
- associative
* …it is learned by relationships of time or location and perfected through repetition
in word learning, children attend to these two things:
(1) social information, such as eye gaze
(2) a speaker’s intent
the semantic-feature hypothesis and the functional-core hypothesis have been proposed to explain…
…concept formation and word learning.
semantic-feature hypothesis
- child establishes meaning by combining features that are present and perceivable in the environment
- as children mature, they add or delete features, and the concept becomes more specific, more closely resembling the generally accepted meaning
functional-core hypothesis
- concept formation begins with the formation of a function or use meaning
- focuses on motion features rather than static perceptual features
associative complex hypothesis
each successive use of a word shares some feature or is associated with a core concept
prototypic complex hypothesis
the child’s underlying concept includes a central reference, or prototype; the closer the new referent is to the prototype, the more likely it is to be labeled with that name
fast/initial mapping
formation of a link between a particular referent and a new name; typically quick, sketchy, and tentative
underextensions
- overly-restricted meanings of a concept
- occurs when child tends to stick to “confirmed core” of words
- common in both receptive and expressive language
overextension
- meaning assigned to concept is too broad when compared to the adult meaning
- occur when a child must communicate about objects that are not inside the “confirmed core”
- usually limited to expressive language
3 general types of overextensions
(1) categorical: child uses a word to label a referent in a related category; usually referencing people
(2) analogical: use of a word to label a referent based on inferred perceptual, functional, or affective similarity
(3) predicate statements: child notes the relationship between an object and some absent person, object, property, or state
three types of multiword utterances
(1) word combinations
(2) pivot schemas
(3) item-based constructions
word combinations
multiword utterances that consist of roughly equivalent words that divide an experience into multiple units
pivot schemas
multiword utterances that show a systematic pattern in which one word/phrase seems to structure the utterance by determining the intent of the utterance as a whole; often includes intonational pattern to convey intent
item-based constructions
multiword utterances that do seem to be following word-order rules with specific words; dependent upon how the child has heard the word being used
3 social-cognitive skills required for child to construct multiword utterances
(1) plan and create a multi-step procedure toward a single goal
(2) form abstractions across individual items
(3) create item-based constructions
second-order symbols
syntactic and morphological markers
3 lexical characteristics that influence linguistic processing
(1) word’s frequency of use
(2) neighborhood density
(3) phonotactic probability
word’s frequency of use
frequently-used words are recognized by a child more quickly and accurately and produced more rapidly than infrequently-used words
neighborhood density
the number of possible words that differ by one phoneme; words in less dense neighborhoods are easier to learn
phonotactic probability
the likelihood of a sound pattern occurring; sound pattern probability is established for the child through experience, and common sound sequences are stored as patterns and used to divide the speech stream into separate words
phonological processes
systematic procedures used by children to make adult words pronounceable; enable children to produce an approximation of an adult model to speech production
reduplication
child attempts a polysyllabic word (like daddy) but is unable to produce one syllable correctly, so s/he compensates by repeating the other syllable (resulting in dada)
open syllables
syllables in multisyllabic words that end in a vowel;
predominate over closed syllables
consonant/cluster reduction
results in single-consonant production of a consonant blend
factors that influence early language acquisition
- individual variation: occurs within and across components of early language
- level of grammatical complexity: in toddlers, reflects vocabulary growth more so than the age of the child
- lexical bootstrapping: vocabulary is the foundation for grammar
syntactic bootstrapping: children can use syntactic knowledge to narrow down word meaning
*phonological bootstrapping: prosody, phoneme, and syllable information in speech are used by a child to determine both - overall health, cognitive functioning, environment of home, middle ear infections (otitis media), motor speech problems, SES, exposure to television, and international adoption and second language-learning
language socialization
language is central to the process of learning culture;
cultural patterns teach children how to communicate;
intertwined nature of this process = language socialization
oral narratives (stories)
uninterrupted stream of language modified by the speaker to capture/hold the listener’s interest; narrator maintains social monologue; include self-generated stories, telling familiar tales, retelling of books, movies, or television shows, and recounting personal experiences
conversations are ______, while narratives are ______
- contextualized dialogues
* decontextualized monologues
