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