Naming: one-word utterances
-Because of some reasons, we cannot decide at what stage do people produce their first words.
-It may cause of the individual differences.
-Some research showed that the children learned their first word when a)they are able to utter a
recognizable speech form. b)in conjunction with some object or event in the environment. The
speech form may be imperfect and the associated meaning may be incorrect.
-These happened because of the physical and brain development.
-The definition of Naming in this context is when children put words to the object.
-It usually accompany by actions no matter the actions from the child or people around him/her.
Holophrastic functions: one-word utterances
-Children usually use single word to express the complex thought that relates to the object.
-Research has shown that by using single word, children can express a variety of semantic functions
and complex ideas.
- Holophrastic means the child use the single word to express the thought while the adult will use the
whole sentence. E.g: ‘peach,Daddy,spoon’ – to describe a situation where Daddy had cut a piece of
peach that was in a spoon rather than say it in a full sentence like the adult does.
Telegraphic speech:two and three utterances
-Children do not proceed as rapidly to two word utterances as one might expect.
* Variety of purposes and semantics relations
-There are variety of purposes and complexity of semantics relations.
-Child uses language to request, warn, name, and etc.
-To end, utterances involve such semantic relations and concepts as agents, action, experiencer,
and etc.
* Low incidence of function words
-2nd feature of the child’s utterances is the low incidence of function words. (articles, prep, be verb)
-Child’s utterances which consisted of ‘the is on the’ (act children never create such utterances)
obviously would have less communicative impact than ‘milk chair’.
-Because children’s utterances at this stage appear to have the character of a telegram message.
They are short and mainly composed of content words.
-This is also known as telegraphic stage.
* Close approximation of the language’s word order
-Final feature is the close correspondence of the child’s word order to that of proper sentences.
-The child learning English tends to say ‘my cup’ rather than cup my’, ‘not tired’ rather than tired not
and ‘daddy come’ rather than ‘come daddy’
-Even with 2 words utterances, child shows some learning of the word order of the language.
-It showed that the child has acquired a significant aspect of the grammar of English which will later
enable the child to comprehend and produce appropriate utterances.
* Syntactic vs. Semantic analysis
-1960s research of child language acquisition was seriously begun.
-The focus was on syntax.
-It is because the source of the idea for the analysis is Chomsky’s syntactic-based theory grammar
which is did not detail the semantic component in his grammar.
-However, characterizing utterances wholly in terms of syntactic form fails to uncover important
information which is the variety of semantics relations and purposes for which utterances are used.
-Simply analyzing the word classes produce data of little important.
-E.g: ‘Mommy chair’ and ‘truck table’ are both Noun + Noun sequences, the first may involve the
concept of possession (Mommy’s chair) while the second may involve that of location (truck on
table).
-Such concept would be missed in a simple word-class analysis. Why?
-This is because in using 2 and 3 word utterances tens to use only a few grammatical classes.
(nouns, verbs, adj).
-Consequently, only little is revealed by word-class analyses and the so called ‘Pivot Open’
Grammar.
-Late 1960s, awareness of semantic aspects of language was arisen.
Morpheme acquisition
-Once 2-3 word utterances have been acquired, children have something on to elaborate.
-They start to add function words & inflections to their utterances.
-Function words: preposition, articles, auxiliary.
-Inflections: plural and tense marking.
* The Brown Morpheme Acquisition Research
-Roger Brown(1973) has done a research on morpheme acquisition.
-The research was done on 3 children. Brown has focused on the acquisition of different function
words and inflections in English.
-Those children acquired the morphemes in a relatively similar order.
-Generally, the speeds of the acquisition for all research are the same.
-A similar acquisition order of these English morphemes has also been found for children with
language disorders.
-There are 14 different morphemes act. Since the ‘on’ and ‘in’ are really two separate morphemes,
Brown treated as one because they are similar in function and acquired at about the same time.
-He found that Present Progressive, Prep, and the Plural were learned well in advanced of
morphemes like the Article, Third Person, and the Auxiliary ‘be’ in both its Uncontractible and
Contractible forms.
-‘What is it?’ or ‘Is Mary happy?’ the copula ‘be’ is considered uncontractible because the contacted
form of the questions, ‘What’s it?’ or ‘S’Mary happy?’ is generally ungrammatical or not widely used.
-The function of ‘be’ is that of the main verb of the sentence, a copula which joins other basic parts
of a sentence.
-This is different from the function of the auxiliary ‘be’ in ‘John is eating ice-cream’ where ‘eat’ is the
main verb and where ‘be’ is used to serve that verb as a marker of time such as present or past.
-As for a Contractible form, ‘Mary’s hungry’ is grammatical as its corresponding non-contracted form,
‘Mary is hungry’.
* Why this order of acquisition?
-Brown checked frequency of occurrences of the morphemes in adult speech to see if more highly
used morphemes were learned faster by the child. Found no r/ship.
-Then considered that the order reflected and increasing order of semantic or grammatical
complexity. E.g: Plural is learned early because requires the idea of ‘number’, whereas the copula
‘be’ is more complex because the child needs to apply both number and tense to select which form
of the copula to use.
-Dulay, Burt and Krashen suggest that there is a sort of predetermined order in the child’s mind that
governed by as yet unknown mechanisms. The morphemes appear in the order of they do because
of such mechanisms.
- But some other people do not agree. They believe a less metaphysical explanation ‘is’ available.
* Explanation of the order of acquisition
-The order of morpheme acquisition can be explained directly and simply by applying psychological
learning principles that are universal and accepted.
-According to Steinberg, there are 3 variables; Ease of observability of Referent, Meaningfulness of
Referent and Distinctiveness of the Sound Signal which Indicates the Referent.
- These variables also affect 2nd language learning as well.
* Variable 1: Ease of Observability of Referent
-Object, situation or event not easily observed by the child is essential for learning.
-The more easily a child can see or hear or otherwise experience the referent. e.g: seeing a dog.
-If someone were to say ‘The dog is barking’ as opposed to ‘The dog barked’ or ‘The dog will bark’,
the referent in the 1st sentence will be more important observable becoz it involves a present
ongoing action, and this difference will affect learning.
* Variable 2: Meaningfulness of referent
-Referent objects, situations or events which are of interest to the child and about the child desires to
communicate will be learned faster than those which lack such interest.
-Naturally the child will remember the more highly meaningful referents.
-Child utterances reflect the concepts which the child wishes to communicate. e.g: ‘Car table’, ‘Car
going’, etc.
-Compared to such grammatical function items as the Article, etc, it is clear that function items have
little inherent meaning for the child who is just beginning to learn the language.
* Variable 3: Distinctiveness of Sound in signaling the referent
-The child able to identify the speech sound that signals that morpheme.
-The greater the sound distinction involved, the easier it will be for a morpheme signal to be learned.
-Former case with ‘is’ is more distinctive from a hearing point of view because it is a separate word
with a vowel, and, as a separate word, it receives some degree of stress in a phase or sentence.
-In contrast, -‘s is a consonant which is manifested as a suffix and does not receive stress.
-The difference between ‘Mary playing’ and ‘Mary’s playing’ is comparatively slight, again because
the –‘s is without a vowel and does not receive any stress; in normal rapid speech such a sound
difference between the 2 sentences is not easy to distinguish.
Rating the morphemes on these variables
Let us rate the morpheme in the brown study on each of these variables assigning a value of high,
medium or low depending on the degree to which we estimate the morpheme to manifest that
variable. So “Mary Playing” takes H-H-H pattern. Why??
Mary’s playing gets a L-L-L pattern why??
Explaining the order of some morphemes by the three variables theory:
Why are the progressive and prepositions ‘in’ and ‘on’ learned earliest?
1- Importance of objects in the child’s world.
2- Progressive contains actions of those objects.
3- While preposition involves the physical action
However not all verbs are used with –ing. The progressive tends to appear first on verbs
involving durative, non-completed events such as play and hold. This would increase in the
meaningfulness of the progressive morpheme. The progressive is used on non-durative
verbs such as break and spill in later stages.
Location is as important as action as well.The prepositions ‘in’ and ‘on’ are highly meaningful
because they signal locations of objects “Doll on box.” Vs. “Doll in box”. 1) They are linearly
sandwiched between two concrete nouns2) the referents remain stationary in in physical
space allowing for easeof observability.
Assignment due next time Nov 24th 2012
1- Why are plural possessive learned before Third person?
2- 2- Why is past irregular learned before past regular?
Later Speech Stages: Rule Formation for Negatives, Questions, Passives and Other Complex
Structures
Features of Negation
-There are 5 different things in producing the negative formation.
-1) Where to insert the negative marker. 2) When and where to insert auxiliary ‘do’. 3) When
auxiliary ‘do’ is used, the tense from the verb is shifted to the auxiliary ‘do’.4) Lexical Concordances
must be made in the case of the negative. 5) Optionally, AUX + NEG (did + not) can be contracted to
‘didn’t’.
-A research has done under negation formation. The research involved 3 children and as the results
it revealed 3 types of period.
-Period 1-‘No Money’. This is the earliest period. The form of ‘no’ or ‘not’ placed at the front of an
affirmative utterance.
-Period 2-‘I don’t want it’. The negative marker tends to appear internally within the utterance rather
than outside it as in the previous period, and the auxiliary ‘do’ appear with the negation marker.
Some researchers believe that children treat don’t and can’t as single words and do not analyze
them as Aux + Neg.
-Period 3-‘Paul can’t have one’. The period before the perfect negatives are formed. The copula ‘be’
and the modal ‘will’ appear with negation and imperative negation. The child has a good idea of
when ‘do’ must be inserted and when is not.
Question formations
-Question forms also demonstrate a complex abstract task which young children can solve.
-Two basic forms: 1) Yes-No Questions-solicit a yes or no answer 2) WH Questions-that uses who,
what and etc.
v Yes – No Questions
-Involves same basic syntactic consideration as in the formation of negatives.
-Sentences which have copula ‘be’, modal, AUX have that item in front of the sentence in a question.
E.g: Is John a very tall boy?
v WH Questions
-PRO (reduced substitute) forms are formed by substituting the phrase which is targeted for
questioning with an appropriate WH word.
-WH word is always placed at the beginning of the sentence.
Passive formations
-Children begin to use more complex forms such as the passive much later in their language
development.
-It occurs so rarely in children’s spontaneous speech
-E.g: The boy pushed the truck – The truck was pushed by the boy.
-The full passive can be produced where certain other subject NPs do not appear. E.g: The door
was opened.
-Children’s comprehension of the passive form does not begin until they are around 4 years old.
-Sometimes the passive form is semantically reversible.
-Around the age of 5, certain verbs used with the passive still cause some comprehension problems
for children.
-Only by the age of 13, the children correctly produce agent-final full passive with ‘by’ and
instrumental passives using ‘with’.
Other problems
v Structure with 2 or more verbs
-The acquisition of complex sentences, utterances containing 2 or more verbs.
-All of these complex forms consist of clauses that are attached to the end of the utterances.
-WH-clauses appear with abstract adverbials. E.g: Can I do it when we get home?
-It is interesting that the adverbs ‘when’, ‘where’ emerge before the nouns that they replace.
v Verb problems
-Carol Chomsky found that some complex grammatical structures may not be acquired until quite
late, even at the age of 10 or 11 years.
-Children sometimes apply it incorrectly depending on the verb in the main clause.