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Semantic Development. Acquisition of words and their meanings First words at about 12 months Initially this is a slow, gradual process Maybe learn a couple of words a week Object words, commands, some social words (bye-bye)
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Semantic Development • Acquisition of words and their meanings • First words at about 12 months • Initially this is a slow, gradual process • Maybe learn a couple of words a week • Object words, commands, some social words (bye-bye) • Then, several months after it begins, word learning speeds up dramatically • Usually begins when child’s vocabulary is around 50-100 words • The “Vocabulary Burst” or “Naming Explosion
The Vocabulary Burst • Rapid increase in the rate of word learning in very early childhood. Estimated that the average 5-year-old knows about 6000 words • If child knows 100 words at 18-months, this means they learn 5900 words over the next 3 ½ years. • Almost 5 words/day • “Fast-Mapping” • How do they do it? • Naming insight: Everything has a name and there’s a name for everything • Application of word-learning strategies or principles specific to this task:
Word Learning Principles • Why do we need them? • Quine’s (1960) “gavagai” example • Taxonomic assumption • Words are labels for categories of things • Whole-object assumption • Words label whole objects, not parts or attributes • Mutual Exclusivity • Avoid attaching two labels to the same object • The disambiguation effect (Merriman & Bowman, 1989)
Word-learning errors • Undergeneralization • Using a word to narrowly, e.g. only using “cat” for your own pet • More common in early word learning, prior to naming explosion • Overgeneralization • Using a word too broadly, e.g. using “cat” to label cats, dogs, cows, etc… • More common after the naming explosion • Do they really think a cow is a cat? More likely it is “lexical gap filling”
Syntactic development • Shortly after the vocabulary burst, kids begin to combine words. • “mommy sock” • Early word combinations typically express a common set of meanings • Recurrence “More bottle” • Negation “No bottle” • Possession “My bottle” • Actor-action “Baby eat”
The 14 Morphemes (Brown, 1970) • 14 early-learned morphemes that are essential to learning English syntax • plural –s, posessive –s, progressive –ing, past –ed, irregular past, third person -s • in, on • the, a • copula be, auxiliary be (contracted and uncontracted) • Vastly increase the complexity of language • Use Mean Length of Utterance in Morphemes as a measure of children’s syntactic development.
What are children learning? • Are they simply remembering and imitating what they hear or are they learning syntactic rules? • Good evidence that they are learning rules • How do children treat words they’ve never heard before: The “Wug” Test • Overregularization of syntactic patterns
The “Wug” Test (Berko, 1958) This is a wug. Now there are two of them. There are two --------. Can do this for possessive, progressive, past morphemes
How do kids do? • Children as young as 3 productively use all of these morphemes on novel words • -ing is acquired the earliest (consistency of form) • Plural, possessive, and past allomorphs next • /wugz/ /wuks/ /wucIz/ • /wugd/ /wukd/ /wudId/ • Those adding the extra vowel are acquired a little later, but even children as young as 4 regularly apply the correct allomorph to the stem.
Overregularization • Application of morphological and syntactic rules • Typically see this with irregular forms • Goed, eated, hurted • Mouses, mooses, childs • Children as old as 7 overregularize as will adults learning a new language • Syntactic rules are represented as such, the exceptions are stored explicitly. • Double markings: “wented” or “mices”
