Lexical Development – The Explosion of Words

Principles of Conventionality and ContrastFirst WordsBuilding the First Vocabulary Relation of Words to ConceptsExplosion of the LexiconLater Lexical Development in Children

Jamie L. dela Paz

Principle of Conventionality•Assumes that words have conventional

meanings, that is, it has to be agreed upon and observed by all members of the language community

•Language will not work if people just invent their own words for things.

• This principle helps the speakers in deciding how to refer to things and the addressees in figuring out what the speaker means (Diesendruck, 2005).

Principle of Conventionality

Principle of Contrast•Proposes that different words have

different meanings

•A close variant of mutual exclusivity assumption but differs because it allows for multiple labels with different meanings

•Children reject apparent synonyms. They assume that unfamiliar words refer to unfamiliar objects or actions.

•This principle states that every two forms contrast in meaning (Clark, 1990).

•Whenever there is a conventional form to express a certain meaning, and the speaker uses a different form it is because the speaker has a different, contrasting meaning in mind.

Principle of Contrast

Show me the dax.

First Words•The age at which the first words are

pronounced, their form, and the rate at which vocabulary develops vary from child to child.

•Culture, social environment, and the child’s character and birth order all influence the age at which the first words appear.

•The first words of children are often heard by adults between 11th and 14th months.

•The growth of early vocabulary is very gradual that on average, children take 5-6 months to arrive at a vocabulary of about 50 words.

First Words

•Elizabeth Bates and her team (1994; 1995) conducted a study with 1,803 parents.

•The parents were asked to mark off words said by their children on a prepared list in order to chart the evolution of English-speaking children’s vocabulary from 8-30 months.

•Other studies regarding children’s first words were also done by Katherine Nelson (1973) and Larry Fenson (1994).

First Words

Results of the studies

Children’s Age

Nelson (1973)

Fenson(1994)

Bates (1994; 1995)

11-13 months --

Average of 10 words

at 13 months

Average of 6 words at 11 months

14-23 months

Average of 50 words

at 20 months

Average of 50 words

at 17 months

--

24 months Average of 186 words

Average of 310 words

Average of 300 words

Building the First Vocabulary•Among the words of the child’s early

vocabulary, nouns are plentiful while predicate forms like verbs and adjectives are relatively rare.

•The majority of the first 50 words of children are names of objects and animals while there are other words like hello, goodbye, there and more.

Common Words in the vocabularies of children younger than 18 months (Clark, 1979 & Pan, 2005)

TOPIC EXAMPLES

Food and drink Bread, cookie, drink, juice, milk

Family Mama, dada, baby

Animals Dog, kitty, duck, cow, horse, bunny

Parts of the body Nose, mouth, foot, ear, hair, hand

Clothing Hat, shoe, coat, nappy

Vehicles Car, truck, bike, boat, train

Games and routines Bye-bye, night-night, peekaboo, hi, shhh

Toys Ball, book, doll, teddy, bubbles

Familiar objectsChair, cup, spoon, bottle, key, clock, flower,

door

Actions Eat, go, up, down, sit, off, back

Descriptive Hot, cold, allgone, dirty

Sound effects Yum-yum, ouch, moo, woof

•Some researchers including Katherine Nelson and Elizabeth Bates have found that 70% of early vocabulary of American children is made up of nouns.

•According to Bates, when children have a vocabulary of fewer than 50 words, nouns account for 45%.

Building the First Vocabulary

Building the First Vocabulary•The composition of vocabulary exhibits

sizable variations in proportion of verbs, social words, and nouns depending on the structure of the mother tongue and children’s language acquisition styles.

•Of the first 50 words produced by French children who are of the same age and linguistic level with that of the American children, 13% were verbs.

Building the First Vocabulary•It is observed that French, Swedish, and

Japanese children who acquired a 50-word vocabulary produce more verbs than English-speaking children.

•Non-noun forms regularly increase when vocabulary passes from 100-600 words.

Building the First Vocabulary•Referential Style: almost the whole

vocabulary of children before 20 months is composed of nouns

•Expressive Style: one finds a balance between nouns and predicate words/ words of the closed class (adverbs, pronouns, articles, and copulas)

Relation of Words to Concepts

•The meaning of some children’s first words seem tied to particular events or contexts, and even later, children may not fully understand the meanings of all the words they use.

•The meanings of words are functions of the concepts the words encode. Words with different meanings encode different concepts.

•To learn the meaning of the words car, doll or run, the child must have the concepts of car, doll or run.

•Sometimes children have concepts for which there is no word in their language, and so they may invent words to fill these lexical gaps.

Relation of Words to Concepts

Explosion of the Lexicon•When children attain an expressive

vocabulary of about 70 words, a veritable explosion occurs: suddenly they say 4-10 new words a day.

•This growth in vocabulary entails a reorganization of the systems responsible for representing and producing words.

Later Lexical Development in Children

•The second and third years of life are the most active word-learning years.

•Lexical development continues throughout childhood, perhaps indefinitely.

•Vocabulary development is aided after the preschool years by children’s increasing abilities to figure out the meanings of words from context and by their exposure to new words through reading.

Later Lexical Development in Children

•Three phenomena that characterize lexical development after early childhood:

▫Growth in vocabulary size▫Growth in knowledge of word formation▫The increasing ability and importance of

being able to learn new words from context

The development of vocabulary in English as a second language children and its role in predicting word recognition ability Maureen Jean and Esther Geva (2009)

Objectives of the study•To examine the extent to which the

knowledge of English word roots of upper English as a first language (EL1) children resembles that of English as a second language (ESL) children

•To examine the specific contribution of English vocabulary knowledge to English word recognition skills of ESL children and their EL1 peers

Background of the study

•The study is patterned after the study conducted by Biemiller & Slonim in 2001.

•It focused on the upper elementary ESL children (Grades 5 and 6) unlike the other researches which focused on children in primary level.

Methodology•Participants

▫207 children: 61 EL1 (35 females and 26 males) and 146 ESL (76 females and 70 males)

▫Each participant had lived in an English-speaking country for at least 4 months.

•Measures: Cognitive, linguistic, and reading measures

Methodology

Nonverbal ability task

Raven Standard Progressive Matrices (Raven; Raven, Court, & Raven, 1983)

Working memory (WM)

Digit span backward from Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (Wechsler, 1981)

Rapid automatized naming (RAN)

Letter naming from Rapid Automatization Naming Test (Denckla and Rudel, 1976)

Phonological awareness (PA)

Auditory Analysis Test (Rosner & Simon, 1971)

Vocabulary A. Receptive vocabulary: Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Dunn &Dunn, 1981)

B. Root word: Written root word vocabulary task (Biemiller & Slonim, 2001)

Word recognition measures

A. Wide Range Achievement Test (Wilkinson, 1993)B. Experimental word reading list (Biemiller &

Slonim, 2001)

Data Analysis Procedures

•Raw scores for all standardized and experimental tasks were used in analyses.

•Two reasons in using raw scores:▫To avoid bias associated with using norms

standardized on samples not representative of ESL children

▫To be able to study change over time

Data Analysis Procedures

•Statistical analyses included descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations, t tests, and multivariate statistics.

Results

•EL1 and ESL groups did not vary on measures of PA, RAN, WM, or word recognition. However, the EL1 group outperformed the ESL group on vocabulary measures.

•Vocabulary knowledge explained a small proportion of additional variance on word recognition concurrently and longitudinally after accounting for the contributions of PA, RAN, and WM.

•Both language groups showed improvements over time and continue to develop their word reading skills from Grade 5 to Grade 6.

•By Grade 5, ESL children can decode words the way their EL1 peers can.

•Word recognition skills are predicted by cognitive-linguistic factors with a quite small contribution of vocabulary knowledge.

Results

References

De Boysson – Bardies, B. (1999). How language comes to children: from birh to two years. Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Diesendruck, G. (2005). The principles of conventionality and contrast in word learning: An empirical examination. Developmental Psychology,

41, 451-463.

Jean, M. & Geva, E. (2009). The development of vocabulary in English as a second language children and its role in predicting word recognition.

Applied Psycholinguistics, 30, 153-185.