Vocabulary development PSYC 453 Aylin Küntay Meeting 2

Words building blocks of linguistic meaning daddy Why a phonological form meaning linguistic category daddy /daedi/ ?? Noun could it be used to desribe an activity? Daedi Why a

Early words People and pets Daddy, abi, nida, kika Common things such as body parts and animals Nose, el, doggie Routines Up, bye, al, bak The study of early vocabulary involves studying the number of words, their phonological forms, and their underlying meanings

What do words do? when pointing to a picture of daddy  NAMING 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 Daddy when pointing to a picture of daddy  NAMING after finding daddy’s tie  POSSESSION offering bottle to daddy  DATIVE, GOAL Pretend shooting a ball  ACTION one-word utterances express richer notions

Why study vocabulary? implications for later cognitive, social and academic development huge individual differences

Individual differences in rate of word learning Big! Need to understand because of theoretical and practical reasons Environmental factors: CDS-related factors such as birthorder, maternal speech (education) Child factors: earlier joint attention skills (Carpenter at al.), better phonological memory (Gathercole and Baddeley), temperament (Slomkowski, Nelson, et al.), sex differences

Vocabulary development children start building their vocabulary AT A FAST PACE at around 18 months, on average, adding 10 new words a day! Age for “first words” is earlier, about 10-12 months But individual differences are big Receptive vocabulary Turning to “puma” when we point and talk Expressive vocabulary Saying “puma” in the right context

What kinds of words are first words? Bates et al.: nearly 40% of average child’s first 50 words are common nouns verbs, adjectives, and function words each account for less than 10% How about research in non-English languages? Gopnik, Choi & Baumberger about an English vs. Korean comparison Korean children have as many or more verbs in their early speech Noun bias vs. verb bias languages

Why a noun bias? Why should nouns be acquired more rapidly than other types of words? Gentner: the concepts referred to by nouns are clearer, more concrete, and more readily identifiable than the concepts referred to by verbs (natural partitions hypothesis) Goldfield: child-directed speech has a bigger range of nouns (i.e., object labels) than words for activities, properties, or relations

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 some of these are actually predicates (i.e., verbs) Nelson: referential vs. expressive styles cross-linguistic challenges

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 Turkish?

Assignments Reading: Pan on Assessing vocabulary, due on Monday, October 4 Worksheet 1: Elif video, October 6