CLD –Lexis and Semantics

LEXICAL DEVELOPMENT

The research of HELEN BENEDICT (1979) revealed that a child learns on average about 10 new words a month and will actively use them and yet s\he can understand 22 new words a month. (i.e. comprehension is ahead of production in the early stages, and this is known as the passive vocabulary). Helen Benedict recognised that a child understands five times as many words as s\he is capable of producing at 18 months.

First Words

KATHERINE NELSON made a study of 18 children’s first 50 words and she noticed the following patterns:

Young children have little sense of the concept of time and therefore talk about the “here and now”.

They rapidly build a vocabulary in several semantic fields.

ENTITIES

PEOPLE: - significant relationships – mummy, daddy, but also visitors –

postman, milkman

FOOD: - drink, juice, milk, water, toast, apple, cake

HUMANS: - baby, man

CLOTHES: - shoes, hat, nappy, coat

VEHICLES and their noises: car, boat, truck, choo-choo, brrr…

ANIMALS: - (real, pictures or TV): dog, cat, lion, horse

TOYS and Games – ball, bricks, ‘peepo’

HOUSEHOLD OBJECTS: - (daily routines) cup, spoon, brush, key, light

BODY PARTS (and functions!) facial words first – mouth, then toes, handies,

nose. (functions – wee wee, poo)

PROPERTIES

Hot, all gone, more, dirty, cold

ACTIONS

(Up), sit, see, eat, go (down)

PERSONAL\SOCIAL

Hello, bye, no, yes, please, thank you

SITUATIONAL WORDS (deictics)

Here, there, that, mine

The largest group of words (60%) were NOUNS, mainly concrete nouns. The second largest group (20%) were words that expressed or demanded actions. The next largest group were MODIFIERS used to describe people or objects. The sample was completed by personal and social words.

Noticeably absent are words that serve only a grammatical function, even though these are very frequent in adult language (e.g. ‘the’, ‘of’, ‘to’).

Lexical Creativity - Being an Inventor

To create new words, children use PREFIXES and SUFFIXES that they already know and COMPOUND words. They also show remarkable CONVERSION abilities. The virtuous error has never been so virtuous.

SUFFIXING

eg	I like to smunt so yesterday I smunted

I like to vond so yesterday I ___________

A child learns the word formation rule and, in addition, that the endings are not just extra sounds but an extra bit of meaning. The child also learns that these sounds and meanings are detachable and can be used often to alter meanings of words in the same way. Unfortunately for the child learning English there are many exceptions and this is when the virtuous errors are made, especially on irregular past tenses and irregular plurals

eg	mouses:	I like mouses

mans:	Those mans are playing football

fell/fall	I falled off my bike.

break/broke	The toy breaked.

They are also impervious to correction by adults, preferring to rationalise and perfect the grammatical process for themselves.

PREFIXES

By grasping common PREFIXES the child is able to further extend his\her vocabulary. For example, he\she can make a word negative by grasping the prefixes ‘dis’ and ‘un’

e.g.	undo	disappear

unzip	dislike

CONVERSION

Children experiment a great deal with this process eg ‘I’m darking the sky’ for ‘I’m colouring in the sky in a dark colour’.

COMPOUNDING

In suffixing and prefixing, we add elements that are not words on their own. Compounding is a process used to describe whole words being combined in their own right e.g. a ‘plate egg’ or a ‘hit boy.’

SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT

Semantic errors occur often during the second and third year.

OVER-EXTENSION – This is when a word is given a broader, more general meaning than it should have eg all men are ‘daddy’. This is the main semantic error made by young children (when a child has a vocabulary of 50 words, it is estimated that about a third of these are likely to be over-extended). As the child’s vocabulary grows, s\he learns words to fill the gaps that over-extended words had previously been used to fill. Where once all fruits were ‘apples’, the child will now know ‘oranges’, ‘pears’, ‘cherries’ etc. This process of over-extension can be defined more clearly:

CATEGORICAL OVER-EXTENSION - The baby over-extends on the basis of the features that combine to give an object meaning e.g. colour, shape, sound, movement etc. So any moving thing with four legs could be called a ‘cat’. All round objects may be ‘moon’.

ANALOGICAL OVER-EXTENSION - Here, over-extension results from similarities in the uses to which objects are put. Things used to hold liquid might all be called ‘cups’.

STATEMENT: This type of ‘usage’ occurs when a child makes a statement about something as a way of labelling e.g. a child points to cupboard and says ‘biscuit’. S\he doesn’t mean that the cupboard is called a biscuit but that it is where the biscuits are kept.

UNDER-EXTENSION

This is the second most common semantic virtuous error made by children. It occurs when a word is given a narrower meaning than it has in adult language. An example is when a child uses the word “shoes” to apply only to the child’s own shoes.

MISMATCH

Here, there is no apparent basis for the non-standard use of a word by the child, as when in one case a telephone was referred to as a ‘tractor’. There is usually no way of tracing back the association of ideas that has caused such misidentifications.

By the age of 2, spoken vocabulary probably exceeds 200 words but after this estimates become extremely vague.

Labelling, Packaging and Network Building

JEAN AITCHISON (1987) identified these three stages or processes that occur during a child’s acquisition of vocabulary.

LABELLING is the first stage and involves making the link between the sounds of particular words and the objects to which they refer (e.g. understanding that ‘mummy’ refers to the child’s mother).

PACKAGING entails understanding a word’s range of meaning. Under-extension and over-extension occur before this stage is successfully negotiated. Consider words like ‘plug’, ‘funny’.

NETWORK BUILDING involves grasping the connections between words: understanding that some words are opposite in meaning, for example, and understanding the relationship between HYPERNYMS and HYPONYMS.