LEXICAL DEVELOPMENT – EXPLOSION OF WORDS

Key Concepts for Understanding Mental Lexicon Words Nominal Word spurt Word biases Constraints in word learning Pragmatic principles in word learning Whorfian hypothesis

Mental Lexicon: Lexical Knowledge in Adults The phonological, grammatical and

vocabulary knowledge of words adults have.

You have a phonological knowledge if you know how the word sounds, grammatical if you know how to use the word in combination with other words, and vocabulary or definition if you know what the word means.

Mental Lexicon: Lexical Knowledge in Adults

The study of lexical development is the study of the child’s acquisition of a mental lexicon.

WHAT IS A WORD?

Word/s

Words are symbols that can be used to refer to things, actions, properties of things, etc.

The relation between words and what they stand for is arbitrary.

The notion of reference is difficult to define, but it is crucial to discussions of lexical development.

Word/s

Reference involves words “standing for” their referents, not just “going with” their referents (Golinkoff, Mervis, and Hirsh-Pasek, 1994).

The Course of Early Lexical DevelopmentFirst Words May Be Context Bound

Children usually produce their first words sometime between 10 and 15 months of age (Benedict, 1979; Fenson et al., 1994; Huttenlocher & Smiley, 1987).

The Course of Early Lexical Development

The particular sounds of first words are not derived in any obvious way from the language the child is learning.

In contrast, first words are approximations of words in the target language, even if somewhat rough approximations.

The Course of Early Lexical Development First words may be context bound,

and the first words children use may be tied to particular contexts (Barrett, 1995).

At the age of 12 months, Martyn Barrett’s son Adam used the word duck only when he was hitting one of his toy yellow ducks off the edge of the bathtub (Barrett, 1986).

The Course of Early Lexical Development Barrett’s son never said “duck” in other

situations, and also never said “duck” referring to real ducks.

The interpretation was that Adam “had not yet learned that the word duck could be used to refer to either his toy ducks or real ducks. Instead, his behavior suggests that he had simply identified one particular event in the context of which it was appropriate for him to produce the word duck (Barrett, 1986, p. 40).

The Course of Early Lexical Development Allison Bloom as reported by her mother,

Lois Bloom, the well-known child language researcher, produced the word car at the age of 9 months, but she said “car” only when she was looking out her apartment window at cars on the street.

She did not say “car” when she saw a car close up or when she saw a picture of a car in a book.


Children’s first words may always be parts of routines or language games (Caselli and colleagues, 1995). Such situation-specific (Bloom’s car) or function-specific (Barrett’s duck) understandings of word use are crucially different from adults’ mental representations of words as symbols that refer.

The Course of Early Lexical Development At around 12 months of age, infants begin

producing their first words in so-called holophrases with discourse-appropriate intonation and emotional tone of voice (Barrett, 1982; Ninio, 1992).

Infants use their holophrases (single-word utterances) to convey the same sorts of communicative intentions for which they use their gestures (Bates, Benigni, Bretherton, Camaioni, & Volterra, et al., 1979; Tomasello, 2008).


Behrend (1990) suggested that context-bound words are merely responses elicited by particular environmental conditions; he termed these words prelexical.

The Course of Early Lexical DevelopmentFirst Words Can Also Be Referential M. Harris, Barrett, Jones, and Brookes

(1988) conducted a research analyzing the first 10 words produced by four children.

They categorized the first words into three groups: context-bound, contextually flexible nominals or names for things and not nominals though contextually flexible in their use.

Word type

James Jacqui Jenny Madeleine

Context-bound

mummygoquacktherebuzzmooboo

weehellomummyherenodownmorego

choo-choobye-byethere

therehelloherebye-bye

Nominal teddyball

Jacquibee

teddydoggymooshoecar

teddyshoesbrumwoofbaby

Nonnominal

more mummyno

yes


Why are some words context-bound and others referential?

Limited experience produces limited understanding to children.

The mothers used their children’s first words in contexts other than the ones in which their children used them.

Some words get used before that common meaning has been inferred.

The Course of Early Lexical Development Words that are at first context bound

gradually become decontextualized (Barrett, 1986; Bates, Benigni, Bretherton, Camaioni, & Volterra, 1979; Dore, Franklin, Miller, & Ramer, 1976).

The description of the beginning of lexical development is one in which children start out with at least two kinds of lexical entries: situation-specific and adultlike.

The Course of Early Lexical DevelopmentVocabulary Development from First

Words to 50 Words

Most children add words to their vocabulary slowly at first but with increasing speed as they approach the achievement of a 50-word vocabulary.

Categories Children’s words (as recorded)

Specific nominals Mommy, Daddy, Rover

General nominals Common nouns: dog, ball, milkPronouns: he, this

Action words go, up, look

Modifiers big, outside, mine

Personal social words no, want, please

Grammatical function words what, is, for

The Course of Early Lexical Development Children’s first words reflect their

experiences. They know names for people, food, body parts, clothing, animals, and household items that are involved in children’s daily routines (Clark, 1979)

Verbs include labels for actions that are part of children’s routines (e.g., eat, drink, kiss, sing) and verbs with more general meanings that are frequent in children’s input (look, go, come, do) (Naigles & Hoff, 2006)


This linguistic condition is called noun bias. Noun bias is a word-learning bias marked by a disproportionate number of count nouns in toddlers’ early vocabularies.

It is believed that noun bias is a universal linguistic phenomenon present in all young children across cultures and languages (Brown, 1973).

The Course of Early Lexical Development The predominance of nouns is one

feature of early vocabularies (Bates et al., 1994; Benedict, 1979; Dromi, 1987; Gentner, 1982; Gentner & Boroditsky, 2001; Goldin-Meadow, Seligman, & Gelman, 1976).

For English-speaking children with vocabularies between 20 and 50 words, fully 45 percent of their vocabulary consist of nouns with 3 percent for verbs (Caselli et al., 1995).


Natural partitions hypothesis – the physical world makes obvious the things that take nouns as labels, whereas the meanings that verbs encode have to be figured out from hearing the verb in use.


Relational Relativity Hypothesis – refers to linguistic work showing that noun meanings are more similar across languages than are verb meanings (Gentner, 1982; Gentner & Boroditsky, 2001).


Children understand that certain kinds of nouns (i.e., count nouns) label objects at the very beginning of language acquisition. Children’s first words, then, are the words they first know how to link to meanings. (Waxman, 1994; Waxman & Lidz, 2006).

The Course of Early Lexical Development The easiest words to learn through

observation are concrete nouns. (Gillette, Gleitman, Gleitman & Lederer, 1999).

Children acquiring Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin (Chinese) show less of a noun bias than do children acquiring English (Fernald & Morikawa, 1993; A. Gopnik & Choi, 1995; Tardif, Gelman, & Xu, 1999).


Under-extensions are word-learning errors that occur when a child uses a word in one context yet fails to use the same word in other appropriate contexts. Children use words in a more restricted fashion.


Overextensions are word-learning errors that occur when a child uses a word to refer to terms outside its category. Children use their words more broadly than the meaning truly allows.

Word Referents

ball ball, balloon, marble, apple, egg, pom-pom, spherical water tank (Rescorla, 1980)

moon moon, half-moon shaped lemon slice, half a Cheerio, hangnail (Boweman, 1978)

baby own reflection in mirror, framed photograph of self, framed photographs of others (personal data)

shoe shoe, sock (personal data)


Word spurt (or vocabulary spurt) refers to the increase of the word-learning rate occurring in the second year of life.

Word spurt is a myth (P. Bloom, 2000).

The Course of Early Lexical DevelopmentProposals Explaining the Word Spurt The onset of maturation of internal word-

learning constraints occurs at 18 months (Behrend, 1990; Mervis & Bertrand, 1994).

Reaching the threshold of a 50-word vocabulary gives children a basis for figuring out principles of how the lexicon works (L.B. Smith, 1995, 2001).

Children achieve a “naming insight” at which point they realize that everything has a name (McShane, 1980).

The Course of Early Lexical Development At 18 months, children come to

understand that words refer not just to particular objects but to object categories (Nazzi and Bertoncini, 2003).

Children’s phonological abilities influence their very early vocabularies, raising the possibility that changes in the nature of children’s phonological systems contribute to the word spurt (Vihman, 1996)

The Course of Early Lexical Development The critical underlying change comes

from ongoing cognitive development (Vihman, 1996).

Children begin to show a cognitive understanding that objects can be grouped into categories about the same time that they become very good at learning object labels—which, after all, label object categories, not individual objects (A. Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1986).


Word learning begins months before children speak their first words. Children as young as 5 months selectively respond to certain words (Mandel, Jusczyk, & Pisoni, 1995).

Individual Differences in Lexical Development Words taught as labels and given explicit

definitions may be more likely to be used referentially from the beginning than words the child picks up from context.

Differences among children in the number of context-bound words in their early lexicons may also reflect differences among children in their approaches to the language acquisition task.

Individual Differences in Lexical Development1. Some children seem to be more

analytic about language learning than others.

2. Children are risk takers (Peters, 1983; Richards, 1990).

3. Sociability

Individual Differences in Lexical Development In Nelson’s (1973) study of lexical

development of 18 children, she found that some children’s vocabularies had much larger percentages of nominals than others’ did.

Nelson labeled the children as referential or referential language style with more object labels in their vocabularies, and expressive or expressive language style with relatively fewer object labels and more personal/social words.

Individual Differences in Lexical DevelopmentEnvironmental Factors that Influence the

Rate of Lexical Development

The effects of birth order are small and not always found, but when they are found, they consistently show that firstborn children have a slight advantage in vocabulary development over later-born children (Fenson et al., 1994; Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998; Pine, 1995).

Individual Differences in Lexical Development The effects of socioeconomic status

(SES) on vocabulary development are also small at the beginning of language development, but these effects grow larger over time and always show that children of more educated parents have larger vocabularies than children of less educated parents (Fenson et al., 1994; Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998; Zhang, Hin, Shen, Zhang, & Hoff, 2008)

Individual Difference in Lexical Development Mothers who not only use words that

are new to their children but who also say something about what the word means have children who build their vocabularies at faster rates.

Longer sentences are more likely to contain explicit information about word meaning, and longer sentences are more likely to contain other, syntactic clues to word meaning.

Individual Difference in Lexical DevelopmentChild Factors that Influence the Rate of Lexical

Development

Some children develop the joint attention skills that mutual engagement requires at a younger age than others (Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello, 1998).

Children who are very outgoing may elicit more input, which, in turn, may support more rapid language development (Slomkowski, Nelson, Dunn, & Plomin, 1992).

Individual Difference in Lexical Development Phonological memory is the ability to

remember a sequence of unfamiliar sounds.

S.E. Gathercole and Baddeley (1989) tested the phonological memory skills and vocabulary of 100 children, first at the age of 4 and then a year later at age 5.

Individual Difference in Lexical Development Children exposed to media, books, and

other educational aids are more likely to have richer vocabularies than those who are not.

The sex difference is small and not always present, but several studies have shown girls to be more advanced in vocabulary development than boys (Bauer, Goldfield, & Reznick, 2002; Fenson et al., 1994; Zhang et al., 1981).

The Process of Word Learning

Word/Speech segmentation is a problem when a child must find the word boundaries or spaces.

Examples:FATHER: Who wants some mango for

dessert?CHILD: What’s a semmango?

CHILD: I know why he’s called Don Quixote. It’s because he’s riding a donkey.


Word mapping is a problem, described by Willard Van Orman Quine (1960), as an infinite number of hypotheses about word meaning are logically possible given the data the child has.


Lexical Constraints on Referent Mapping

The whole-object assumption is the child’s assumption that words refer to whole objects (Markman, 1996).

The mutual-exclusivity assumption is the assumption that different words refer to different kinds of things (Markman, 1996).

Heather Goldberg and Johanne Paradis University of Alberta and Martha Crago University of Montreal

Abstract

The English second language development of 19 children (mean age at outset = 5 years, 4 months) from various first language backgrounds was examined every 6 months for 2 years, using spontaneous language sampling, parental questionnaires, and a standardized receptive vocabulary test. Results showed that the children’s mean mental age equivalency and standard scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test—Third Edition nearly met native-speaker expectations after an average of 34 months of exposure to English, a faster rate of development than has been reported in some other research.

Abstract

Children displayed the phenomenon of general all-purpose verbs through overextension of the semantically flexible verb do, an indicator of having to stretch their lexical resources for the communicative context. Regarding sources of individual differences, older age of second language onset and higher levels of mother’s education were associated with faster growth in children’s English lexical development, and nonverbal intelligence showed some limited influence on vocabulary outcomes; however, English use in the home had no consistent effects on vocabulary development.

Research Questions and Predictions Some ESL children, as a group, would

approach native-speaker norms for receptive vocabulary size more rapidly because they would have had more limited opportunities to use their L1 outside the home; hence, more exposure and practice with English.

Given that the ESL children were older than the L1 learners, they would meet or surpass native-speaker expectations when amount of exposure formed the basis of comparison.

Research Questions and Predictions If minority L1-majority L2 children

would show developmental process like majority L1-minority L2 children in French immersion.

ESL children would initially display overextended uses of the high-frequency, semantically flexible verb do, but the general all-purpose (GAP) uses of do would diminish toward the end of the study, in contrast with immersion students.

Research Questions and Predictions If mother’s level of education, use of

English in the home, age of onset of English learning, and nonverbal IQ would influence the children’s receptive and expressive vocabulary growth.

Each of these variables would impact on the children’s lexical development in their L2 such that higher levels of mother’s education, higher use of English in the home, older age of L2 onset, and higher nonverbal IQ would be associated with faster growth in lexical development.

Methods

PARTICIPANTS The participants consisted of 19 minority

L1 children residing in Edmonton, an English majority language city in western Canada. They had a mean age of 5 years, 4 months, and had received an average of 9 months’ exposure of English in the context of a school or preschool.

Methods

PROCEDURES There were five rounds of data collection,

one approximately every 6 months. Children were visited in their homes two or

three times during each round of testing, and they participated in a battery of language tasks.

The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test—Third Edition (PPVT-III; Dunn & Dunn, 1997) and the spontaneous speech sample were used.

Methods

PROCEDURES A questionnaire was administered to the

parents at each round of data collection where information about parental employment and education, as well as language use in the home was gathered.

They used maternal level of education in years to determine a family’s socioeconomic status.

Language use in the home was documented using 5-point scales

Methods

PROCEDURES The data collected from the questionnaire

were used to derive the values for three of the variables predicted to affect L2 acquisition over time:

Age of onset of exposure to English (AOE) Mother’s level of education (MLOE) English use in the home (ENGHOME)

The standard scores from the Columbia Mental Maturity Scales were used for the last predictor variable, nonverbal IQ (NVIQ).

Methods

PROCEDURES Spontaneous speech data were collected

using a semistructured interview followed by a free play in 45-minute videotaped session between the child and the research assistant.

For the analysis of the GAP verb phenomenon in the spontaneous speech transcripts, it was decided that contextualized use of the lexical verb do would be examined.

Discussion

The purpose of this study was to examine vocabulary development over time in children learning English as a L2 from a variety of L1 backgrounds to understand how they compared to monolingual peers, whether they displayed developmental processes and what factors influenced individual differences in their rate of lexical development.

Discussion

The children would achieve native-speaker norms for vocabulary size faster than the ESL children in the Miami study, based on the contrast in community context between the two groups. The ESL children were most likely more immersed in English, inside and outside school.

Discussion

The study examined children’s use in context of the verb do to determine if it was overextended such that it appeared to be a general all-purpose (GAP) verb, and if this changed over time.

GAP “Do” Utterance Participant L1 Appropriate verb

He do ribbit, ribbitHe do a baseball

TRRKRNL

ArabicCantonese

SayThrow

I can do any nightMy dad can do a person

CNDXSMNS

MandarinSpanish

PlayDraw

The we did recessI did some loud

SHHNRMLM

FarsiJapanese

HaveBlow

I do like this (protects face with hands)

I could do my kites

SBST

RMLM

Spanish

Japanese

Put my hands in front of my

faceBuild, make

Discussion

The ESL children whose mothers had postsecondary education had higher raw scores and a greater number of different words in production across rounds. Children’s lexical development is enhanced in higher SES families.

Applied Implications and Conclusions ESL children may take somewhere

between 3 and 6 years to be indistinguishable from English native speakers in receptive and expressive vocabulary development.

ESL children may display patterns of limited verb lexical diversity as they stretch their lexicons to meet the demands of the communicative situation, and may overextend semantic meanings of verbs.

Applied Implications and Conclusions Certain factors like children from

higher SES backgrounds who were older than preschoolers appeared to have some advantage and higher general intelligence exerted a limited effect as well.

Applied Implications and Conclusions Educators and healthcare professionals may

encourage use of English in the home to give the child maximal exposure and practice with the majority language of the society.

In contrast, L1 maintenance is directly related to language choice in the home, and L1 maintenance is beneficial to minority children’s cognitive, educational and social-emotional development (Anderson, 2004; Cummins, 1991, 2000; Hakuta & D’Andrea, 1992; Wong, Fillmore, 1991).

LEXICAL DEVELOPMENT – EXPLOSION OF WORDS

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