COMS 3063 quiz 6 Flashcards

The toddler is using her hand to point at the toy. She is using gesture to communicate. This helps the toddlers to make communicate before they can fully express themselves with words

Imperative pointing

Learn the meaning of a new word after minimal exposure.

Overextension

What's that

The word is spoken in a complete sentence

Underextension

All of the above

Left imang

A baby’s first word marks the beginning of a transition from preverbal to verbal
communication, and ushers in a new and exciting period of language development.
Parents may record their child’s first word along with the age at which the child
spoke the word and the context in which he or she said it. Partly because of the
excitement about this achievement, researchers know that, on average, babies pro-
duce their first word around age 12 months.

describes the idiosyncratic
wordlike productions children use consistently and meaningfully but that do not
approximate adult forms. As the term suggests, PCFs have a consistent sound struc-
ture, but children may use them to refer to more than a single referent.

such as imperative and declar-
ative pointing, in episodes of joint attention between prelinguistic infants and other
people. In this section, we examine the important role gestures continue to play in
language development in the second and third years of life

Gesture use precedes spoken language as children transition from the prelinguistic
stage to the one-word stage of language development and then from the one-word
stage to the two-word stage

such as holding a fist to the ear to indicate telephone, pretending to go to sleep, or waving the hand to indicate bye-bye

In Chapter 5, we defined theory of mind (ToM) as the ability to understand one’s
own mental or emotional state, to understand that others also have mental or emo-
tional states, and to realize that others’ mental and emotional states, beliefs, in-
tentions, and perspectives differ from one’s own

human phonological system begins to solidify from
early infancy as babies take in the speech sounds they hear, categorize these sounds
in meaningful ways, and use their implicit knowledge of speech sounds to begin to
segment fluent speech into increasingly smaller units of meaning (clauses, words,
morphemes)

. Recall from our discussion of norms in
Chapter 4, that the ages by which children can produce consonantal phonemes
in English vary widely among research reports. Perhaps the most popular set of
norms for phoneme attainment are Sander’s (1972)

. As toddlers begin to gain more control over their ar-
ticulators, adults witness developments in their phonology. Some people may view
toddlerhood as a period during which young children talk in cute or funny ways.

is the process by which children change one sound in a syllable
so it takes on the features of another sound in the same syllable.

Toddlerhood is witness to tremendous growth in language content. During this
time, toddlers progress from novice to expert word learners and make large gains in
both their receptive and expressive lexicons. In the sections that follow,

For a toddler to learn a new word—or create a new lexical entry—he or she must
minimally do the following: segment the word from continuous speech; find ob-
jects, events, actions, and concepts in the world; and map the new word to its cor-
responding object, event, action, or concept.

Lexical Principles Framework for Acquiring New Words
Recall from Chapter 4 that language-development theories have implications for
how people view various language achievements. Word learning is no exception.Recall from Chapter 4 that language-development theories have implications for
how people view various language achievements. Word learning is no exception.
The fact is that children rapidly learn new words in a very short period of time,
and we know far less about how they do this than we want to admit. Because
we cannot look into the child’s brain and see exactly what is happening when
he or she acquires a new word, we have to rely on theories, of which there are
many.

First-Tier Principles. The three principles that compose the first tier of the lexi-
cal principles framework do not require much linguistic sophistication. Children can
use Tier 1 principles as soon as they begin to acquire words because these princi-
ples rely on cognitive-perceptual abilitie

The principle of reference states that words symbolize objects, actions, events, and
concepts. For example, the word Daddy stands for or symbolizes someone’s father;
a child can use this word in the presence of his or her father, or the child can re-
fer to his or her father who exists in a different place (“Daddy is at work”) or time
(“Daddy wore a red hat yesterday”).

The principle of extendibility conveys that words label categories of objects
and not just the original exemplar. Therefore, the word ball can describe multiple
objects that fall under the basic-level category ball (baseball, basketball, soccer ball,
tennis ball

..

Second-Tier Principles. The three principles that compose the second tier of
the lexical principles framework are more sophisticated and become available to
children as they refine their hypotheses about the nature of words.

conventionality states that for children to communicate successfully, they must
adopt the terms that people in their language community understand (see Clark,
1993). Children begin to refine their vocabulary and the Tier 1 principle of refer-
ence by using the principle of conventionality when they recognize that some of
their “baby” words, such as blankie for blanket, are not conventional among other
speakers in their culture.

The principle of categorical scope builds on the Tier 1 principle of extend-
ibility by limiting the basis for extension to words in the same category. Consider
the following scenario: An experimenter shows a toddler a picture of a banana
then asks the child to “find another dax.” The experimenter then allows the child
to choose between three pictures: a bunch of grapes (an item in the same super-
ordinate category as the banana—fruit), a monkey (an item thematically related
to the banana), and a crescent-shaped moon (an item perceptually similar to the
banana).

The principle of novel name–nameless category (N3C) supports the Tier 1
principle of object scope by helping children select a nameless object as the re-
cipient of a novel label. The N3C principle rests on the principle of mutual exclu-
sivity, which states that objects have only one label (Markman, 1989; Merriman &
Bowman, 1989). The principle of mutual exclusivity comes into play in situations
where children hear a novel label and see a series of objects in the environment for
which they already have labels. For example, suppose you present a toddler with a
box containing a ball, a book, and a thermometer. Suppose further that the toddler
knows the words book and ball but does not know the word thermomete

Social-Pragmatic Framework for Acquiring New Words
Proponents of the social-pragmatic view of word learning believe children do not
require domain-specific mechanisms, including the lexical principles just men-
tioned, to acquire new words. Rather, these theorists propose young children are
adept at using social cues to determine what a speaker is referring to, and that
understanding speakers’ referential intentions assists children in learning language
(Sabbagh & Baldwin, 2005) and overcoming the Quinean conundrum

Fast Mapping
Have you ever used a fairly complex word in front of a toddler and later, to
your amazement, heard the toddler use that word? As you undoubtedly know,
toddlers’ ability to pick up words after only a few incidental exposures, or even
a single exposure, is remarkable. This ability is termed fast mapping because of
the brief exposure to the novel word and its referent, for which children form a
lexical representation (Carey & Bartlett, 1978). As one example, a toddler might
quickly learn that his parents exclaim “uh oh!” when he drops something on the
floor from his high chair. After just a few exposures to that word, the toddler
might himself exclaim “uh oh!” when he drops a toy or a piece of food on the
floor.

Thematic Roles Toddlers Acquire
A thematic role is the part a word plays in an event, and such roles include agent,
theme, source, goal, and location (O’Grady, 1997). An agent is the entity that per-
forms the action (Nicole ate pasta). The theme is the entity undergoing an action or
a movement (Tamika flew a kite). A source is the starting point for movement and
a goal is the ending point for movement (Maurie drove from Richmond to Char-
lottesville). Location is the place where an action occurs (Ryan hiked through the
park).

Receptive and Expressive Lexicons
Recall that the receptive lexicon is the words children comprehend, and the ex-
pressive lexicon is the words children produce. Although young children begin ac-
quiring new words relatively slowly, some researchers contend that toddlers’ word
learning enters an explosive period between approximately 18 and 24 months of
age, or at around the time they can produce 50 words. This period has been aptly
termed the vocabulary spurt, word spurt, or naming explosion.

Overextension, or overgeneralization, is the process by which
children use words in an overly general manner. Toddlers make three major kinds
of overextensions: categorical, analogical, and relational. Toddlers make categorical
overextensions when they extend a word they know to other words in the same
category. For example, if a child learns the word dog and then calls all four-legged
animals “dog,” he or she is making a categorical overextension. Another example
would be if a child learned the word milk and called all liquids “milk.”

Underextension. When toddlers learn new words, they use these words cau-
tiously and conservatively at first. This process, whereby toddlers use words to refer
to only a subset of possible referents, is called underextension. When a toddler girl
uses the word book only when referring to the hardcover books in her collection
(and not to her parents’ paperback books), or when she uses the word bottle to refer only to her baby bottle (and not to glass bottles or plastic water bottles), she is engaging in underextension.

Overlap. When toddlers overextend a word in certain circumstances and under-
extend the same word in other circumstances, this process is called overlap. For
example, when a toddler boy uses the word candy to refer to jelly beans and his
grandmother’s pills (overextension) but not to chocolate bars (underextension), he
is engaging in overlap.

Reasons for Word-Use Errors. Toddlers’ overextensions, underextensions, and
overlaps might be viewed as types of errors in their early word use. These errors
are often very cute (as when a toddler yells “mama” to a stranger), but they also
present the opportunity to learn a great deal about young children’s language ac-
quisition and the way in which they learn new words. Why do children make such
errors? At least three possible explanations have been offered as to why children
use words in different ways than adults (see Gershkoff-Stowe, 2001). First, children
may make category membership errors. For instance, they may truly think a horse
and a cow are the same kind of animal and thus use the word horse to label a cow
because they know the word horse.

Language Use
In addition to acquiring new grammatical constructions and words as they tran-
sition from the one-word stage to combining two or more words, toddlers obtain
important new language, or discourse, functions and conversational skills.

Discourse Functions
By the time children begin to combine words, they can use a variety of language
functions. These functions include instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal,
heuristic, imaginative, and informative functions, terms we introduced in Chapter 1
(Halliday, 1978; see Table 1.1). Children can use instrumental functions, including
requests, to satisfy their needs. They can also use regulatory functions, such as im-
peratives (commands), to control other people’s behavior, interactional functions to
interact with others in a social way, and personal functions to express their feelings
about something. In addition, children can use heuristic functions by requesting
information from other people to learn about the world, imaginative functions by
telling stories to pretend, and informative functions to provide information to other
people. Children’s success in using communication for a variety of purposes is one
of the most important aspects of communicative development during toddlerhood.

Conversational Skills
One area in which toddlers do not display much skill is conversation. Conversational
skill requires the ability to initiate a conversational topic, sustain the topic for several
turns, then appropriately take leave of the conversation. In Chapter 2, we discuss the
concept of a conversational schema, which is a model specifying the organization of
conversations. Toddlers are beginning to develop this schema, but they are relatively
poor conversationalists. Anyone who has attempted to have a conversation with a
young child knows it is not usually sophisticated, as in the following examples:
Conversation 1:
Parent:  What did you do at Grandma’s house?
Toddler: Played.
Conversation 2 (a bit later):
Parent: Why do you love going to Grandma’s house?
Toddler: Because I love it.
Toddlers may demonstrate some skill in starting a conversation, but they can-
not usually sustain it for more than one or two turns. Typically, the adult bears the
burden of maintaining the conversation on a particular topic. Toddlers also have
difficulty keeping their audience’s needs in mind: They may use pronouns without
appropriately defining to whom they refer (“He is cheating!”), and they may discuss
topics without ensuring the listener has a sufficient frame of reference to under-
stand the context (“I want to read my favorite book, not this book”). You may also
notice that in conversations, when you ask a toddler a specific question or give
him or her an explicit opportunity to take a turn, the child will not always take the
opportunity. The toddler may simply not respond or may respond noncontingently
(off the topic). Toddlers are not yet proficient at realizing when they are not follow-
ing along in a conversation and are thus not likely to seek clarification.

What Factors Contribute to Toddlers’
Individual Achievements in Language?
Like infants, toddlers develop language in a fairly predictable pattern because they
meet certain milestones in the same order and at about the same age. However,
certain aspects of their language development vary. In the next section, we discuss
both intraindividual and interindividual language differences among toddlers,
along with factors that may account for such differences. As you read this section,
please keep in mind our discussion of averages and medians in Chapter 5. As was
true for infancy, there is no such living person who represents the “average toddler.”
When we describe averages and medians, we are referring to descriptive statistical
manipulations, not to real children.

Intraindividual Differences
If you observe an individual toddler for any length of time, you will most likely
notice that his or her language development is not linear. For example, a toddler
might learn several new words within a week and then not learn any new words
for the next few weeks. In fact, children individually experience a series of spurts
and plateaus in their language abilities as they develop (Fenson, Bates, et al., 2000).
Likewise, as we mentioned in Chapter 5, comprehension of language generally
precedes production. This fact makes sense on many levels. Consider, for example,
your personal abilities to comprehend and produce foreign languages. Most likely,
you can understand significantly more than you can say. The idea that comprehen-
sion precedes production holds true for the size of toddlers’ receptive and expres-
sive lexicons as well. In fact, this intraindividual difference continues throughout
the preschool and school-age years and even into adulthood.

Interindividual Differences
If you observe a group of toddlers, you will most likely note language-development
differences among them. Interindividual differences in toddlers’ language devel-
opment relate to a number of factors, including gender, birth order, and socioeco-
nomic status. Next, we discuss interindividual differences and some of the factors
accounting for them.

Effects of Gender
Several studies have revealed some effects of gender on language development in
terms of both the pace at which children acquire language and the communication
styles they use. For example, Fenson, Bates, and colleagues (2000) determined that
boys both comprehend and produce fewer words than girls. Specifically, they found
that 18-month-old girls understand an average of 65 words and produce about
27 words, whereas boys of the same age understand an average of 56 words and
produce about 18 words. Bauer, Goldfield, and Reznick (2002) similarly reported
that boys lag behind girls in lexical development. Likewise, a study of 386 pairs of
toddler twins, revealed that girls produce more words and more two-word combi-
nations than boys (Van Hulle, Goldsmith, & Lemery, 2004)

Effects of Birth Order
In addition to gender, researchers have discovered associations between birth or-
der and language development. For example, for toddlers between the ages of 18
and 29 months, firstborn children exhibit more advanced lexical and grammatical
development than their later-born counterparts, whereas later-born children exhibit
more advanced conversational skills (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998). Why might the order
in which children are born relate to language development? One suggestion is that
firstborn children (and only children, who are firstborn by default) receive much
more one-on-one attention than do children who are not firstborn, and thus receive
a greater quantity of child-directed speech.

Effects of Socioeconomic Status and Parental Education
Socioeconomic status (SES), which usually includes some measure of family in-
come, parental education, or occupational status, is associated with a variety of
health, cognitive, and socioemotional outcomes in children; these effects begin
before birth and continue into adulthood (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002). As is true
for infants, SES is associated with toddlers’ receptive and expressive language de-
velopment. For example, typically developing African American toddlers from low
SES backgrounds perform more poorly on standardized measures of receptive
and expressive language than do their counterparts from middle SES backgrounds
(Horton-Ikard and Ellis Weismer, 2005). Analyses of spontaneous language samples
reveal similar effects of SES. Even after adjusting for ethnicity, toddlers from lower
SES backgrounds (as measured by maternal education) have shorter MLUs and use
fewer words than toddlers from higher SES backgrounds (Dollaghan et al.,1999). Al-
though family income and education levels are highly related, a longitudinal study
examining caregivers’ speech to toddlers between 14 and 30 months of age found
that parents’ education level is more closely associated with the complexity of par-
ents’ language than family income (Huttenlocher et al., 2007).

How Do Researchers and Clinicians
Measure Language Development in
Toddlerhood?
Researchers
When studying language development in toddlerhood, researchers have a broader
range of language data to consider than do researchers studying language develop-
ment in infancy. The reason is that toddlers not only comprehend language but also
produce it. As language researchers, we, the authors, have used a variety of mea-
sures to assess children’s language development. Here we review several methods,
in three categories: production tasks, comprehension tasks, and judgment tasks.

Production Tasks
Production tasks allow toddlers to demonstrate their competence in various areas
of language development. In these tasks, researchers ask children to produce, or
say, the language targets under investigation. Some production tasks are unstruc-
tured or semistructured, such as naturalistic observation; other production tasks
are structured and systematic, such as elicited imitation and elicited production
tasks.

Naturalistic Observation. We introduced naturalistic observations in Chapter 5
when we described methods researchers use to study language development in
infancy. Naturalistic observations of children’s spontaneous productions are of great
value in toddlerhood as well, when researchers can analyze children’s morphology
and syntax for the first time. Probably the most famous naturalistic observations are
Roger Brown’s (1973) longitudinal observations of children with the pseudonyms
Adam, Eve, and Sarah. As a result of Brown’s analysis, we know, for example, that
children’s earliest utterances containing forms of the verb to be (am, is, are, was,
were) include contractions (e.g., it’s). Recall from our earlier discussion that toddlers
may learn some contractions as a “word,” or whole unit, rather than as two separate
words to which they apply a contraction rule

Elicited Imitation Tasks. To gauge children’s underlying linguistic competence,
researchers can use elicited imitation tasks, which take advantage of children’s nat-
ural ability to imitate other people’s movements and speech sounds. In elicited im-
itation tasks, the experimenter produces a target phrase and then requests that the
child repeat it exactly as he or she heard it. The experimenter carefully selects sen-
tences that vary only by the grammatical structure under investigation. Researchers
have used elicited imitation tasks to explore children’s competence with word order
and anaphora, which are linguistic units (such as pronouns) that refer to a previous
linguistic unit. (For example, in the sentence “Doug prefers to cook for himself ,”
the word himself refers to Doug.)

Elicited Production Tasks. Elicited production tasks are designed to reveal
aspects of children’s language abilities (e.g., syntax, morphology, pragmatics) as
they produce specific sentence structures. Researchers elicit sentence structures in
the context of a game, during which the child must ask questions or make state-
ments in response to an experimenter’s prompt. Perhaps the most famous elicited

Comprehension Tasks
Comprehension tasks reveal toddlers’ language competencies not by asking them to
produce language targets, but by having them either match or point to pictures of
target words and phrases or act out phrases they hear an experimenter say.

The Picture Selection Task. In a picture selection task, an experimenter pres-
ents a language target and asks the child to choose the picture corresponding to
the target. For example, an experimenter who wants to determine whether a child
can differentiate between the /l/ and /r/ sounds might ask the child to select the
picture of glass from between a picture of glass and a picture of grass. Researchers
frequently use picture selection tasks to investigate children’s understanding of lex-
ical items and syntactic constructions, including the distinction between active and
passive voice (e.g., John wrote the book = active voice; The book was written by John
= passive voice). For examples of morphosyntactic contrasts that can be assessed
with the picture selection task.

The Act-Out Task. Researchers can use an act-out task to investigate a child’s
competence with various language constructions. To administer the task, an exper-
imenter presents a child with a series of props and instructs the child to act out the
sentences he or she hears. For instance, if you are interested in assessing a 3-year-
old’s ability to comprehend agent and recipient relations, you might say something
such as “The dog tickled the cat”, and then ask the child to act out that particular
sequence with a toy dog and cat.

Judgment Tasks
In judgment tasks, researchers ask children to decide whether certain language
constructions are appropriate as a way to assess their level of grammatical compe-
tence. Researchers can infer that children possess adultlike levels of grammatical
competence when they judge adultlike constructions to be correct and nonadultlike
sentences to be incorrect. Two types of judgment tasks researchers routinely use
are truth value judgment tasks and grammaticality judgment tasks.

Truth Value Judgment Tasks. In truth value judgment tasks, children must judge
certain language constructions to be correct or incorrect. These tasks take two forms:
yes–no tasks and reward–punishment tasks. In a yes–no task, an experimenter pres-
ents a scenario and asks the child a question. For example, an experimenter who
wants to gauge a child’s comprehension of quantifiers might present a picture and
ask, “Is every mother holding a baby?” or “Is a mother holding every baby?” and
note the child’s response. In a reward–punishment task, an experimenter introduces
a puppet and explains to a child that he or she should reward the puppet with a
cookie (or some other treat) when the puppet says something “right”, and should
punish the puppet by withholding a treat when the puppet says something “wrong.”
The experimenter uses sentences containing the target linguistic construction, but
such sentences are declarative rather than yes–no questions. For example, a puppet
might say, “Every mother is holding a baby,” and if the puppet’s sentence describes a
photo correctly, the child would reward the puppet with a treat.

Clinicians
Clinicians have a wide array of measures at their disposal, ranging from parent-
completed checklists to comprehensive direct assessments that cost hundreds of
dollars. Even though toddlers are prone to acting according to their own agendas,
measuring the language development of toddlers is arguably easier than measuring
that of infants. The reason is that toddlers can follow simple instructions during an
assessment and are generally eager to play along when the clinician structures the
assessment to resemble a game rather than a test

Screening
Clinicians may screen a child’s language skills to determine whether the child is
experiencing difficulty with particular aspects of language and whether the child
might need a more comprehensive language evaluation. Screening measures in tod-
dlerhood, like those in infancy, use common early language milestones, against
which the clinician or a parent can compare the child’s own language abilities.
Screening measures generally use an informal approach, such as a checklist format,
to quickly and efficiently assess a child’s language abilities. As one example of a
screening measure available online, the National Institute on Deafness and Other
Communication Disorders (http://www.nidcd.nih.gov) distributes a series of develop-
mental language screens that parents and clinicians can use to screen a child infor-
mally. See Figure 6.4 for an example of a screening measure for toddlers ages 1 to
2 years and 2 to 3 years.

Comprehensive Evaluation
Clinicians may use a comprehensive language evaluation to determine whether a
child has a language disorder and, if so, to learn more about the nature of the disor-
der. Unlike screening measures, evaluations are generally structured, standardized,
norm-referenced (see Chapter 4 for a discussion of norm-referenced measures), and
limited in duration rather than ongoing

When administering a comprehensive evalua-
tion, clinicians should always consider ecological validity, or the extent to which
the data resulting from these tools can be extended to multiple contexts, including
the child’s home and child care settings. It is also important that clinicians verify
the results of a comprehensive evaluation with parents to determine whether the
child’s results are representative of his or her abilities before drawing any conclu-
sions about the child (e.g., “The evaluation revealed that Neil tends to confuse the
pronouns him and he, us and we, me and I, and her and she. Do you notice the
same problems at home or when he’s talking to you or when he’s playing with his
brothers?”)