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Describe the properties of early child language (between 12 to appr.

24
months) in terms of the acquisition of vocabulary.
Although infants as young as nine months old are able to understand
words from a string of speech and comprehend them later on (Cairns &
Fernandez, 2011), it is not until the age of between 12-18 months that a child
produces their first word, which is recognisable because it clearly refers to
something specific. Between the ages of about 12-24 months a vocabulary
spurt occurs, during which children are acquiring and producing at least one
or two words per day (Cairns & Fernandez, 2011). This essay will attempt to
describe the properties of early child language with reference to vocabulary
acquisition during this period.
One of the features of the vocabulary spurt which begins from the age of
about 12 months is fast mapping, which occurs when a child hears a word only
once or twice, works out which grammatical class it belongs to and uses it in
sentences before fully understanding the meaning. She begins to acquire the full
meaning as she continues to use it. This leads to grammatically accurate, but
nonsensical or miscommunicated sentences being produced, for example a
stone cat being referred to as shy because it fits with the definition a child has
formed of the word. Children do not learn the correct meanings of referential
words by being taught explicitly, but by experiencing them in their general
environment and context. (Cairns & Fernandez, 2011)
When children begin to produce vocabulary, they have a preference for
producing nouns. It is possible that this can be explained by care-giver speech;
despite there being evidence that mothers use more verbs than nouns they are
more likely to prompt children to produce nouns than verbs. (OGrady,
2005).This is possibly because it is something concrete that they can get the
child to focus on
Another explanation for childrens early vocabulary being noun-heavy is
that children are likely to focus on objects with the four properties of the Spelke
objects. These properties indicate that preferred objects are likely to be
cohesive, and exist as complete entities independent of anything else. They are
also likely to be solid, impermeable and tangible and not move on their own, as
well as be continuously in view of the child. Young children tend to show
surprise when an object does not have the Spelke properties, and will not, for
example, expect objects to vanish and reappear discontinuously or to move on
their own without contact (OGrady, 2005).
In the first fifty words a child produces, the non-nouns are likely to
include comment on disappearance, the success or failure of an action, rejection
or negation, or calls for attention (OGrady, 2005).This would support the
hypothesis that childrens first words are related to their immediate situation.
Mothers of children whose early vocabulary is less composed of relational
nouns and more of words to express relations and activities tend to use more
social vocabulary when talking to them, where mothers of children who are
more noun-dependent tend to have spent more time drawing attention to the
names of objects. (OGrady, 2005). Although a possibility which has been raised
is that children with different styles of language acquisition have different
cognitive behaviours, another possibility is that the different styles simply come
from different early experiences with language. (OGrady, 2005).
Childrens first utterances tend to consist of only one word and this stage
is referred to as the holophrastic stage. At first the meaning of these utterances
is tied to the immediate environment and situation, but eventually children
start to show displacement and will use words to refer to things or situations
which are not actually present or happening. Each one word utterance seems to
be intended to convey a more complex meaning, which must be inferred from
the situation. When a child only utters one noun with no verbs, prepositions or
locations, there are a number of things to which the utterance could refer
(Fromkin, Rodman & Hyams, 2011). If, for example, a child said only the word
juice, they could be asking for some juice, simply naming the object in front of
them, or making a comment that something has happened to the juice. This
would suggest that children are capable of more mental processes than they
have the language to express (Fromkin, Rodman & Hyams, 2011).
OGrady (2005) gives three word-learning strategies which children use
to acquire nouns: The whole object assumption, which assumes that a new word
refers to a whole object, the type assumption that a new word refers to a type of thing,
not just to a particular individual and the basic level assumption that a new word refers
to types of objects that are alike in basic ways. The effects of these strategies can be
seen as a lot of childrens first nouns refer to objects which are alike in basic
ways, and it is possible that these strategies are responsible for the twin
concepts of underextension and overextension.
Overextension is when a child uses a word to refer to a much broader
category of meanings the word belongs to than what the word is generally used
to refer to, for example calling all four-legged animals dog. Overextensions
tend to be based on perceptual and functional similarities, such as shape, colour
size, sound or texture. (OGrady, 2005). It is interesting to note that children
will almost always use the middle-level term in a three level set such as
animal dog poodle, which seems to reflect a similar tendency in adults to do
the same when speaking to children, referring to things as specifically what
they are and not being too general or too specific (Yule, 2012).
There is evidence that overextensions are not mistakes by young
children, but are attempts to express what they know through the language
they have, when coming across something that they do not have the language
for. OGrady (2005) gives the example of Allen, who stopped using the word
dog for cats and sheep upon learning those words. If Allen thought that dog
meant animal, learning the word cat wouldnt have changed anything. [] He had just
been borrowing it until the right word came along. This would suggest that
children are not overextending through genuine belief that the things they are
describing are the word that they produce; they are simply using it for lack of
an alternative.
Another study (Fremgen and Fay 1980, cited in Cairns & Fernandez,
2011) demonstrated that childrens overextensions in production do not
necessarily remain in comprehension. Children who called all four-legged animals
doggie were perfectly able to discriminate between cats and dogs in a picture-selection
task. This would definitely suggest that overextension is not a cognitive
problem with being unable to differentiate between different objects, but simply
a problem with being unable to access lexical items in language production.
When a child uses a word to only refer to one of a subset of a category of
things, this is underextension, for example if a child uses the word kitty to
refer only to her family pet but not to other cats. (OGrady, 2005).
Underextensions are less likely to be noticed than overextensions, because an
adult noticing the child using the word kitty would not be aware that the
child did not use the word to refer to all cats. (OGrady, 2005).
Both underextensions and overextensions do not last very long, and
most children cease to use both by the age of about 24 to 30 months, nonetheless
they are common in the early stages of language acquisition, with as many of
30% of the vocabulary of children between the ages of 12-24 months having
their meaning extended at least some of the time. (OGrady, 2005).
Young children do not just use vocabulary from what they hear in adult
language; they also start to form unique words which are not produced by
adults. Conversion, in which a word of one class is converted into a word of
another, e.g. from a noun to a verb, happens from before the age of 24 months.
Although not every noun can be made into a verb, e.g. *Im needling something,
lots of English verbs are created from nouns, e.g. Im hammering something so a
child who is making conversion errors has already worked out one of the ways
in which they can be creative with language. (OGrady, 2005).
Derivation is a word production method which children use by adding
functional morphology to words which they are already familiar with. Damon
(Clark, 1987, cited in OGrady, 2005), used four of the most common verb
endings : -er, meaning doer, -ie, a diminutive, -ing, to express an activity, and
ness to describe a state. Derivation is often overused by young children, and is
another way in which they realise how they can be creative with language.
(OGrady, 2005).
Compounding tends to occur from the age of eighteen months and
involves putting two (or more) words together to describe a particular concept,
for example crow bird to mean a crow. Young children overuse compounds, and
(Clark, 1993, cited in OGrady, 2005, claims that this is due to one of the
preferences children have for language: transparency of meaning; building the
meaning of a word from its constituent parts. In a study (Clark, Hecht and
Mulford 1986, cited in (OGrady, 2005), children seemed to prefer to use
compounds to describe a concept they hadnt come across before, with the next
most common word making strategy being derivation. Children also produced
more types of compounds than adults. This would imply that childrens use of
language is more productive than adult usage, before they learn which words
are possible and which are not.
To conclude, early child vocabulary has many distinct features. These are
distinct from the features of adult language because adults do not always
produce the same words as children. Children fast-map words and rely on
under and overextension which both lead to words being used incorrectly. They
also make efforts to produce new words which do not occur in adult language.
This linguistic behaviour is exclusive to young children who are just beginning
to acquire vocabulary.








References
Fernndez, E. M. & Cairns, H. S. (2011). Fundamentals of
psycholinguistics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman and Nina Hyams. 2010. An introduction to
language. Wadsworth: Cengage Learning.
OGrady (2005) OGrady, W. (2005). How children learn language.
Cambridge: CUP (8
th
edition).
Yule, G. (2010). The study of language. Cambridge: CUP (4th edition).

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