1. Vocabulary development
PSYC 453
Aylin Küntay
Meeting 2

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

3. 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

4. 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

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

6. 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

7. 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 months
But individual differences are big
Receptive vocabulary
Turning to “puma” when we point and talk
Expressive vocabulary
Saying “puma” in the right context

8. 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

9. 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

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

11. 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?

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