Lexis, Grammar and Semantics

Question 1

Underextension

Answer 1

When a child uses a word in a very restricted way.

e.g. when a child says banana but only means the food and cannot relate it to pictures of bananas

Question 2

Overextension

Answer 2

when a child uses a word to refer to several different but related things.
e.g. calling every fruit an apple

Question 3

Aitchison three development processes

Answer 3

1. Labelling - when a child links a sound to an object - call it by its correct name
2. Packaging - when a child begins to understand the range of meaning a word might have. they recognise that the word bottle can cover different shapes and sizes, but that they all have a similar function
3. Network building - when a child starts to make connections between words - e.g. they understand that words have opposites like big and small or know that little and small are synonyms.

Question 4

What five categories did Nelson put first words into?

Answer 4

• Classes of Objects: dog, shoe, ball, car
• Specific Objects: Mummy, Daddy
• Actions / Events: give, stop, go, up, where
• Modifying things: dirty, nice
• Personal / Social: hi, bye-bye, yes, no

Question 5

What is overextension? Outline the two types Rescorla identified

Answer 5

Categorical - when a word is used to refer to things in a similar category
Analogical - when a word is used to refer to things that aren’t clearly in the same category but have some physical or functional relation to each other.

Question 6

What are holophrases?

Answer 6

single words that express a complete idea - an individual word performs the same function as a sentence would.

Question 7

What happens in the telegraphic stage?

Answer 7

children start to use three or four word combinations

- also formed according to grammatical rules

Question 8

‘Wug’ test Berko

Answer 8

Berko 1958
children were shown a picture of a made up creature ‘a wug’. they were then shown a drawing of two of the creatures when they exclaimed that there were now ‘two wugs’.
the test showed that children hadn’t used the -s because they were imitating someone, as they had never heard of a wug before. they’d automatically used the rule that states -s is added to a noun to form a plural
this is called internalisation - they’d heard the rule so often that it was second nature to apply it to make a plural