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THE PERIOD OF SINGLE-WORD UTTERANCES
Before acquiring implicit knowledge of regularities in word structure infants must first have some basic idea of what a word in the language may be like.
The results from previous research suggest that infants have developed the capacity to identify words in the linguistic input, even when these words are embedded in a sentence context.
They also have acquired implicit knowledge about word structure, but it is not clear how infants have acquired this knowledge.
- Almost every human child succeeds in learning language. As a result,
people often tend to take the process of language learning for
granted.
- Language is the most complex skill that a human being will ever master. In a very real sense, language is the
complete expression of what it means to be human
Pragmatic and grammatical developmentThere is, at present, no evidence that
word boundaries are more or less reliably marked in infant-directed speech than in adult-directed speech.
There is, however, evidence that utterances in infant-directed speech are more clearly separated by pauses than those in adult-directed speech (e.g., Broen, 1972).
The comprehension of multiword sentences
This study explores the role that gesture plays in the earliest stages of language
learning. We describe how one-word speakers use gesture in combination
with speech in their spontaneous communications, and interpret gesture
presented in combination with speech in an experimental situation.
The child has a number of wordsStudy that the child has a number of words understood before the first word
produced, possibly as many as 100.Further, we know that the acquisition
of the first 50 words in production can take some time. Most attempts to
follow receptive vocabulary after the first 100 words are given up because
acquisition is so rapid.
Estimated size of receptive vocabulary for Craig and
Amy inBenedict (1979) at the time
of the acquisition of the 50th word inproduction
By the end of the period of single-word utterances, the child has a relatively large receptive vocabulary. Benedict, for example, gives data on two subjects for the first 200 words in comprehension. Table 6.11 estimates the size of their receptive vocabulary at the time of the 50th word produced.
Method of testing
comprehensionIt cannot be overemphasized that testing comprehension, even
of single words, in children around 1 year to 18 monthsis quite difficult. How do we know, for example, that the child
understands'dog' in the way we do? The typical procedure is to present the
child withalternatives that are systematically varied. This was done in the
study byThomson & Chapman (1977). Even so, children at this age are
often notobliging: they may not attend, crawl off, or start to cry. When
they doattend, we still have problems of scoring a response. They may
touch oneobject, then another, or only look at the object.
These problems are even greater when we investigate the understanding of sentences. For
example, suppose we wish to test the child’s understanding
of the Possessor-Possessed structure as in ‘Mommy’s shoe’. How do we do this? If we say ‘Give me Mommy’s shoe’ we are actually testing a greatercomprehension, which includes the verb ‘give’. Just
saying ‘Mommy’s shoe’does not direct the child to any scorable response.
Suppose, however, thatwe teach the child a game, so that we name
something, and the child hands itto us.
Studies on sentence
comprehensionThere has been a small number ofcreative studies in recent years
on the receptive ability of children who are
only producing single-word utterances
Shipley, Smith & Gleitman (1969)
Was not directly a study of comprehension. Rather, it tested whether children would prefer to respond to language from their
parents that was at the child’s level of production, or in advance of it. That
is, it was indirectly a study of the young child’s notions of
grammaticality or well-formedness.
Shipley, Smith & Gleitman studied two groups of children which theycalled the holophrastic group and the telegraphic group. Here we will look just at their data in regard to the holophrastic group. There were foursubjects in the group:
Name Age MLUKaren 1;8 1.10Mike 1;6 1.o6 Linus 2;o 1.09Jeremy 2;o 1.16
The children were tested individually in a room where
they were allowedto play freely while the mother and an experimenter talked to
each other.Then, periodically, the mother
would turn and direct a command to her
child.
There were three main types of commands directed to the child(where V = verb, N = noun, F = functors):well-formed (VFN) ‘Throw me the ball!’telegraphic (VN) Throw ball!’holophrastic (N) Ball
The object was to see if the children would prefer one of these three kinds ofstructures over another.
THE PERIOD OF SINGLE-WORD UTTERANCES
Structures
Subjects N (%) VN (%) VFN (%)
Mike 33 50 16
Karen 80 75 83
Linus 46 16 42
Jeremy 16 33 0
Mean 52 44 35
Percentage of times each of four children in Shipley, Smith &Gleitman (1 969) would touch an appropriate toy in response to each ofthree constructions
These results indicate that Craig, at least, was able to
recognize fourlexical words in a sentence and carry out a command in
an appropriatecontext
Huttenlocher (1974) Huttenlocher reported preliminary results on herlongitudinal study of four children over
a six-month period. The childrenwere between 10 and 13 months of age when the study began. They
werevisited every few weeks and observed on their development of receptive and
productive language.
Child speech perception
The stimuli aremeaningless in that the infant does not yet see these sounds as parts of
words. Child speech perception, however, is operationalized here to
referto the child’s ability to perceive
speech sounds that are part of what the child
identifies as a word.
There are two components to phonemic perception. One is
the ability to discriminate speech sounds, that is, to hear them as distinct. The other is
the ability to classify the sounds discriminated
into phonological categories.
The onset of phonemic perception and production
The child has begun to develop a semantic system during the period, and by its end shows some
evidence of comprehending multiword utterances, at least in terms of their major semantic
categories. In this section we turn now to the child’s emerging phonological system. The
discussion will begin with a look at perceptual development, followed by a treatment of the
phonological characteristics of the child’s first 50 words or so in production.
,
The research with infants indicates that
the first of these abilities is quite
developed in the first year of life; the second, however, adds a great
deal of complexity to the child’s task
Principle of the Linguistic Sign in our discussion of Stern, is a unique genetic
feature of humans, it appears to be dependent in part on earlier developments.
Its operation becomes particularly noticeable in comprehension during this period, where the vocabulary grows to an impressive size
before much productive vocabulary appears. That is, the child is beginning to identify and
categorize the speech sounds in his words into linguistic categories.
The onset of phonemic perception and production. Day 1. Spend time with the child teaching a nonsense word, e.g. ‘bak’, until the child shows2. Day 2. Teach the child a second word, e.g. ‘zub’, until the child shows evidence of learning worsd3. Test for non-minimal opposition:” Ask the child to respond to two nonsense words that havenon-minimal oppositions, e.g. ‘bak’ vs. ‘zub’. Do this until the child shows evidence ofhearing a difference.4. (Next day? Time unclear). Teach the child a third nonsense word that contains a minimalopposition to one of the earlier words, e.g. ‘mak’.5. Tests for new non-minimal opposition:” Ask the child to respond to the newest word taughtwith the second word taught, e.g. ‘mak’ vs. ‘zub’.6. Test for minimal opposition: Place the objects for all three nonsense words in front of the child.
Shvachkin’s proposal is that we seek minimal pairs in the child’s
perceptionin order to be able to say with any confidence that a contrast exists.
For example, suppose we determine that the child hears
the differencebetween ‘pig’ and ‘cake’. Since
the words differ in all three segments, we do
not know if the child processes all three segments, or focusses on
only one.
Shvachkin was very aware that children may have contextuallybased knowledge, that is, ability to do something in one context
but not inanother. He used six methods,
therefore, to test for the comprehension of a
test pair. The child would only be given credit for the acquisition of
anopposition if he succeeded in at
least three of these methods.
Six methods used by Shvachkin (1948173: 101-2) to testphonemic perception of a minimal contrast
Pointing to the object: The child would be asked to point out the object among a selection of
2. Giving of the object: The child would be asked to hand the object to the experimenter,
3. Placement of an object: The child would be asked to place several objects in different place
4. Finding the object: The child would be asked to find one of the objects.5. Operation of one object in relation to another object: The child would be asked to seek outthe object to put one object upon the other.6. Substitution of objects: The child would be asked to get an object in a particular place, butanother object would be there instead. The child was observed to see if there was a reaction of disappointment