2. Prelinguistic communication Snow: infants and mothers engage in prelinguistic conversations Mothers interpret the smiles and vocalizations of babies as social culturally different: attributing intentionality to prelinguistic infants Cries and gurgles (when infants are not distressed) Cooing: mostly vowel-like sounds or sequences of sounds Babbling: 5-8 months: syllabic combinations of vowels and consonants allows practice with sounds before use them communicatively Development of pointing 12 months point at object, then check adult’s focus of attention 18 months check adult’s focus of attention, then point at object
3. Prelinguistic gestures Gestures: actions and vocalizations which are produced with deliberate intention to communicate, but which do not take the form of recognizable linguistic units start around 8 months of age Bates et al.: 2 communicative/pragmatic acts (e.g., in pointing) Proto-Declaratives (Assertions): the use of an object as a means of obtaining adult attention Proto-Imperatives (Requests): the use of adults as a means to an object
4. Phonological development Eimas et al., Jusczyk: infants as young as 4 months old can perceive phonemic distinctions Not only from the native language, but also from other languages Categorical sound perception is innate but after 8 months or so: ability to distinguish nonnative contrasts diminishes Phonological reorganization: phones are organized into the phonemic categories of the native language
5. Early words Lexical development: the study of the development of vocabulary Semantic development: the study of the development of meaning the two are very much interlinked what is the scope of meaning of early words? how are prelinguistic meanings mapped onto words?
6. Lexical development Clark: on the assumption that children start building their vocabulary at around 18 months, on average, 8-9 new words a day! Collected in diary studies and checklists that include words that the children are likely to acquire and that are filled out by parents e.g., MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI)
7. What kinds of words are first words? Bates et al., Nelson: nearly 40-65% of child’s first 50 words are common nouns verbs, adjectives, other words each account for less than 10% How about research in non-English languages? Chinese and Korean children have as many or more verbs in their early speech Noun bias vs. verb bias languages
8. Cross-linguistic studies Tardif (Mandarin Chinese), Gopnik & Choi (Korean), Clancy, Fernald (Japanese) these languages are different than English rich verbal morphology, verb-final, allow noun ellipsis (i.e., dropping) where context is clear Korean& Japanese-speaking mothers used fewer nouns than English-speaking mothers Korean and Japanese children use verbs earlier than English-speaking children but use fewer and less varied nouns
9. Why a noun bias? Why should nouns be acquired more rapidly than other types of words? The concepts referred to by nouns are clearer, more concrete, and more readily identifiable than the concepts referred to by verbs verbs are conceptually and linguistically more complex Clark: early verbs tend to be general-purpose verbs such do, make, go, and get Child-directed speech has a bigger range of nouns (i.e., object labels) than words for activities, properties, or relations
10. Noun bias: challenges Bloom, Gopnik: early words also include lots of relational words such as gone, up, there, more, uh-oh, again and social/performative words such as hi, bye cross-linguistic challenges-- e.g., Chinese and Korean
11. One-word utterances: ¨Holophrases¨ one-word utterances are used with communicative intent parents place interpretations on one-word sentences such as up as ¨take me up¨ how can we attribute meaning to such brief and unstructured utterances? What are the communicative functions of these utterances? RICH INTERPRETATION researcher looks at nonverbal context to make rich interpretation Daddy when pointing to a picture of daddy ==> NAMING after finding daddy’s tie ==> POSSESSION offering bottle to daddy ==> DATIVE, GOAL one-word utterances express underlying relational notions
12. Overextensions and Underextensions Unconventional word/meaning mappings Overextension: when a child uses a word in a context or manner that is inconsistent with, but in some way related to the adult meaning of the word term is extended to concepts beyond the adult concept daddy for adult men cat for all four-legged animals bye-bye to greet visitors Underextension: when a child uses a word for only a limited subset of the contexts used by the adult cat for the home pet only truck for the toy truck only
13. Semantic development: how? The gavagaiproblem: how do children map words onto observations about the world? Infinite number of possibilities how does the learner zero in to the right meaning? has come to be known as the mapping problem Constraints or Principles children entertain working hypotheses about the meanings of new words the meaning of new words involves some process of comparing new to old semantic knowledge
14. Principles or constraints whole object constraint (Macnamara, Markman): when a new label is introduced, assume that it refers to the whole object rather than its parts novel name-nameless category principle (Golinkoff): new labels are mapped onto previously unnamed concepts principle of contrast (Clark): the principle that no two words have exactly the same meaning principle of mutual exclusivity (Markman): no overlap between words, assuming that an object can only have one name
