CHILD’S SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT

Student: H. BİLOKCUOĞLU

INTRODUCTION

Semantic development: gradual acqusition of words and the meanings they carry

-First words are usually produced at around the first year of birth.

-It is a slow but a gradual process in which a child, perhaps, learns a couple of words a week.

-Some social words like bye-bye, hello, etc., object words, and command words are initially learnt.

-Words learning speeds up dramatically after several months when first words are produced. This usually emerges when child’s vocabulary is about 50-100 words. This is called ‘vocabulary burst’.

BURST of VOCABULARY

-A sudden and rapid increase of word gaining in young child

-It is estimated that the average five year old child gains about 6000 words, because:

-a child is estimated to know 100 words at the age of 18 months, which is equal to 5900 words over the next 3.5 years, about 5 words a day

A child has that insight that everthing has a name and there is a name for everything.

FAST MAPPING

Fast mapping is one way children learn what a particular word means. When they hear a word for the first time, kids can often figure out what it means. This instinctive method of learning uses information the child already knows to help him or her place the word in the right context. Often, the kids narrow down the meaning by excluding possibilities that already have words attached to them and apply the unknown word to the object or action that does not already have a name.

First described in 1978 by Carey and Bartlett, fast mapping is usually applied to children. Kids do not learn their mother tongue through active teaching but rather through picking up words and their meanings through everyday life. For instance, the concept of a black cat is understood by children who identify the word cat as a particular sort of animal and also as a particular inanimate representation of that animal in a book or as a toy. The concept of  black enters their minds as a colour that can apply to many objects because they hear it used in this context.

PRINCIPLES (of word learning)

According to Ellen Markman (1991) there are three word learning principles:

*the whole object assumption (words refer to an object rather than to its parts or features)

*the mutual exclusivity assumption (another label can be used to refer to a feature or part of an object)

*the taxonomic assumption (labels should be extended to an object of the same kind rather than an object that is thematically related)

ERRORS

* UNDERGENERALISATION-Using a word in a very narrow sense, for

instance using the word ‘cat’ only for your own pet.

* OVERGENERALISATION-Using a word too broadly, e.g, using ‘cat’ to call

not only cats but also dogs, cows, and the other animals

-young children ususally make overgenarlisations to fill their ‘lexical gap’.

CHILD’S SYNTACTIC DEVELOPMENT

*Young children start to make simple combinations with words shortly after the emergence of vocabulary burst, for e.g; ‘mommy sock’*early word combinations usually contain simple recurrence, negation, possession and actor-action utterences. For example:-Recurrence ‘’More bottle’’-Negation ‘’No bottle’’-Possession ‘’ My bottle’’-Actor-action ‘’ Baby eat’’

EARLY LEANT MORPHEMES (BROWN, 1973)

14 EARLY LEARNT MORPHEMES: MLU

Plural –s Possessive –s Progressive –ing Past –ed Irregualar past Third person –s In, on Copula be, aux.be

(contracted&uncontracted)

Mean Lengh of Utterance in morphemes can be employed to measure a child’s syntactic development.

MLU

Mean length of utterance (MLU) is the average number of morphemes per utterance. It is an index of expressive language development used beyond the stage of single words, when a child uses two or more words together in an utterance. It is calculated in 100 spontaneous utterances by counting the number of mor Mean length of utterence  (MLU) is the average number of morphemes per utterance. It is an index of  expressive language development used beyond the stage of single words, when a child uses two or more words together in an utterance. It is calculated in 100 spontaneous utterances by counting the number of morphemes in each utterance divided by the total number of utterances. MLU is used as a benchmark to assess individual differences and developmental changes in grammatical development in children in the early stages of language acquisition.

ARE CHILDREN REALLY LEARNING or SIMPLY IMITATING?

• It is obvious that children are accually learning the syntactic rules

Good evidence that they are learning is the ‘WUG TEST’ developed by Berko (1958). They treat words perfectly they have never heard before.

Another evidence could be children’s overregularisation of syntactic patterns.

The WUG TEST

Children are also capable of doing this for

possessive, progressive, and past morphemes

OVERREGULARISATION

*misapplication of morpho-syntactic rules*this can typically be seen with irregular verbs and forms, for example, eat-eated, go-goed, put-puted etc., mouse-mouses,

child-childs

*studies demonstrate that children as old as seven often make overregularisations, just like adults learning another language.

*it is a typical mistake for young learners to do double markings as well, like ‘wented’ or

‘mices’.

TIMELINE of EXPLORATIONS in the FUNCTIONS of LANGUAGE

Children of 3 years old productively use all of these morphemes on novel words

-ing is acquired the earliest Plural, possessive, and past allomorphs

are what follow the ing form The extra vowels in endings are acquired

a little later, at the age of four, children regularly apply the correct allomorph to the root. (Brown, 1973)

REFERENCES

  Berko, J. (1958). The Child's Learning of English

Morphology. Word, 14, 150 177. Brown, R. (1973) A first language: The early stages.

Oxford, England: Harvard University Press. Carey, S. & Bartlett, E. (1978). Acquiring a single new

word. Proceedings of the Stanford Child Language Conference, 15, 17-29. (Republished in Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 15, 17-29)

Markman, E. M. (1991). The whole-object, taxonomic, and mutual exclusivity assumptions as initial constraints on word meanings. In S. A. Gelman, J. P. Byrnes, S. A.