PHONOLOGICAL AND LEXICAL DEVELOPMENT

1. Phonological knowledge

 What the child needs to know – Adult Phonological Knowledge

 Babbling stage
 From babbling to First Words
 Syllable to Phonemic Development
 Phonological Process in Child Speech

2. Lexical development

 Early Lexical Development

 The ‘Vocabulary Explosion’
 Over- and underextension
 Problems faced by the child in learning new words

Phonological knowledge

Adult Phonological Knowledge

Phonology is the study of the sound systems in languages. Each study has a set of
phonemes, which is called the phoneme inventory, a constructive systems of different
sound sequences. Minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language,
spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element and have distinct meanings.
There is a test to know whether a sound is a phoneme or not, it is called minimal pair test.

However, not all different sounds in a language represent different phonemes. There are
some differing sounds which are called allophones since they are different version of the
same phoneme. Say the word “look” and “milk” to yourself and focus upon the “l” sound;
are they the same?

We know the phonotactics of our own language: which sound can come after which other.
This is called legitimate sequences. E.g.: /b/ + /r/ is fine before vowel (bright), but not /l/
+ /n/ before a vowel. We know phonological rules.

Children’s speech sound development

Prelinguistically:

 Crying: starts use of vocal cords; airflow to vocal apparatus

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  Cooing / laughing: initially uses lengthened vowel sound; then adds vowels together

 Vocal play (typically appears after around 4 months): preconditions to prosody

o Child starts to control the sounds it can make to a better degree
o Can start to manipulate the pitch (to produce squeals and growls)
o Can start to manipulate the loudness (yelling)
o Starts to constrict the vocal tract to produce friction noises, nasal murmurs,
“raspberries” or “snorts”
o Training the vocal apparatus, it will need to produce sounds later

Some more evidence for early phonological knowledge

Children from a very early age are sensitive to certain features of their mother tongue. They
prefer the intonation patterns of their own language over others. They show preference for
maternal voice. They can make phonemic discriminations between sounds not in their
language (perform better than adults).

But what about distinctions within their own language? Are they able to make subtle
phonemic discriminations?

Voice Onset Time

Voicing: vibration of the vocal cords

The VOT is a feature of the production of stop consonants. It is defined as the length of time
that passes between the release of a stop consonant and the onset of voicing, the vibration
of the vocal folds, or, according to other authors, periodicity

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Categorical Perception – Adults

Categorical perception is a phenomenon

of perception of distinct categories when there is a
gradual change in a variable along a continuum.

Eimas et AL. 1971

This early study looked at whether young

infants were also able to make the same
categorical judgements about phonemes in
their won language. They took a group of 1
and 4-month-old babies and wanted to see
if they could make similar judgements to
the adults. They used a habitual sucking
technique. Babies were presented and
then habituated to a bilabial plosive sound
of a certain Voice Onset Time; so, their
sucking increased and then decreased as
they got used to it. They then changed the
VOT by + 20ms, sometimes this crossed the /b/ - /p/ boundary, sometimes it didn’t

Prelingusitic Communication

Holliday (e.g. 1993): using non-linguistic means to achieve communication function. He tried
to interpret gesture and how children responded to different gestures. The child was able to
interpret those gestures, even if the child has no phonemic development, he was able to
communicate in a non-linguistic way:

o Grasp object release = ‘I want (to hold) that’

o Touch object momentarily, lightly = ‘I don’t want that’
o Touch object firmly, for a measurable time = ‘Keep doing what you are doing with
that (e.g. throw it in the air)’

He found evidence that these were used consistently by the child Nigel in his study from
ages 0;6 – 0;10

Babbling (circa 6-12 months)

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We distinguish between two different types of babbling:

 Canonical / Reduplicated babbling: repetition of same consonant + vowel pairs (C 1V1

+ C1V1). E.g. /ba + ba/, /da + da/, /ga + ga/
 Variegated / Non-reduplicated Babbling: combination of different consonant +
vowels pairs (C1V1 + C2V2, or possible C1V1 + C1V2). E.g. /wa + ma/, /mo + me/, /bo +
da/. During this second stage we start t osee aspects og language development like
prosody emerge. The babbling starts to sound like “real” language.

It doesn’t vary that much among different languages

Effect of input on babbling

 Early sounds – similar regardless at target L1

 6 months + - language specific features found.
Development of prosodic features
Adults can start to tell which “language” a child is babbling in

Summary of development at end of babbling

By the end of the babbling stage, children have learned a great deal about their target L1
language:
 Know that some sounds are contrastive, and some are not (phonemes vs.
allophones)
 Certain consonants are found frequently
 Prosody features
 Some phonotactic rules

Still much to learn, however. For instance, you very rarely see anything other than a
consonant + vowel sequence. Few consonant clusters, for instance.

Babbling to words

Typically, we think about the early stages of child development in the following way:
1. Crying (from birth)
2. Cooing (emerges 6-8 weeks after birth)
3. Babbling (6-12 months)
4. First words (around 10-15 months)

There is often significant overlap between these latter two stages

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Factors contributing to development

Physical growth and development

 Vocal tract changes
 Muscles, including tongue, changes

Maturation of the nervous system

 Initial vocalization controlled by brain stem
 Continued development of cortical control of vocalization

Experience
 Hearing speech on daily basis
 Monitoring own speech input

Neurological development

Phonological development (12-18 months)

The first words seem to be built up from syllable combinations, instead of individual
phonemes. Often, the syllable structures that were present in the babbling stage appear in
the early words that the child uses.

Think about the stereotypical first words that the child learns: Mama (C 1V1 + C1V1) – mother
and papa (C1V1 + C1V1) – dad. These structures seem to be learned and inserted / combines
as whole units. We don’t see any different versions of these syllable structures. This differs
from later phonological development.

Phonological development (18month-3years)

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Emergence of phonological representation. Words now composed of phonemes rather than
sequences of syllables. Any difference between adult system tend to be predictable. Many
phonological processes are similar across children / languages. In other words, we can look
at the early words that a child says, and we can see the same kind of differences when we
look at a number of children

Example of phonological processes

Whole word processes

 Weak syllables deletion: /bela/ for ‘umbrella’, /puta/ for ‘computer’
 Final consonant deletion: /fo/ for ‘thought’
 Reduplication: /si si/ for ‘Sesame Street’
 Consonant cluster reduction: /kak/ for ‘cracker’

Segment substitution processes:

 Fronting: velar replaced by alveolar or dental, /ti/ for ‘key’
 Stopping: a fricative replaced by a stop, /turch/ for ‘church’
 Gliding: /wabit/ for ‘rabbit’

IPA Consonants

Holophrastic speech

Since the child has limited lexical resources early on, they may use one word to mean what
an adult would use a sentence to convey. A child’s word refers to a whole complicated or
sophisticated sentence. This is called holophrastic speech
 Dada – “pick me up dad” / “play with me”

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  Cup – “I want my cup”
 Water – “there’s some water” / “I want some water”

This is often combined with other non-linguistic communicative means, or differing prosody
to try and distinguish different meanings.

Lexical development

Lexical development

We seem to know between 70,000 and 150,000 words. The link between a word and a
meaning is arbitrary so that’s a lot of mappings between meanings and form to remember.

We store all the words we know in the mental lexicon:

 This is an ordered structure of the lexemes we know
 Words seem to be li ked according to phonological similarity and semantic similarity
(and possibly morphologically)
 Inflectional morphemes and lexical roots would be stored differently and combined
online

Early lexical development

Produce first words between 10.15 months.

Proto. Vs. ‘real’ words
 /ma.ma/; /da.da/; /is.ki/ ‘biscuit’, /ɛ.wɔ/ ‘aeroplane’
 Not “adult” words, but still are used consistently to refer to the particular object.

Early words tend to refer to people, concrete nouns, actions, modifiers, personal social
words, some functions. From about 10 to 15 moths, the development of the child’s lexicon
proceeds relatively slowly. After 15 months, there is a claimed huge increase in the rate at
which new words are learnt by the child, this is known as vocabulary “explosion”

Key problems in learning new words

Learning a new word poses a number of problems for the new child:
 What parts of the incoming auditory stream are actually words?
 How exactly do words to things?
 Do they apply to just the object in the context it was first learned? Or similar things?
And what counts as similar thing?

We can talk about two problems faced by the child:

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  The segmentation problem – what exactly is a word?
 The mapping problem – what exactly is the link between the word and the objects?

Speech segmentation problem

As we have seen, identifying word boundaries in a stream of connected speech is not always
easy. But learning to split up this stream is crucially important for lexical learning.
Otherwise, how does a child know what a word is?

Children can use prosodic cues to help work out word order: stress patterns in words and
intonations. Also, children seem to be highly skilled at using cues to work out where word
boundaries are likely to be.

Statistical learning

There are different probability patterns between syllable sequences within-words, and
between words
 Pretty#boy
 Pre – ty sequence within the word much more common than:
 Ty – boy between the words. Phonotactics rules tell they don’t go together

Experiments showed that 8-month-old children were able to use this information. They
showed some impressive ability to glean a lot of information about probability patterns
from a previously unheard speech signal.

Statistical learning (Safran et al, 1996)

8-month-old were presented with “words” that contained English syllables

 Bidaku#padoti#golabu#bidaku
 Only clues to “word” boundaries are the transitional probabilities

Infants were trained on these “words” so they should be familiar to them. In the
experiment, they were then played three syllable strings. Sometimes they were “words”
they had heard before, other times they were “non-words” which used the same syllables in
a different order. Infants listened longer to new “non-words” than previously encountered
“words”. This could have only happened if they use this statistical information to split up the
stream into “words” and commit them to memory.

The mapping problem

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Also known as the problem of induction. A child hears a word for the first time and is usually
shown an object that the word refers to. So, the task seems pretty easy, right? The child just
has to remember that the word it hears should be linked to the object it is seeing. It seems
much less complex than trying to learn complex phonological or syntactic rules. Maybe,
however, it’s not as easy as you might at first think.

“Gavangi”

The problem faced by the child is shown well through a thought experiment from the
philosopher of language WV Quine. He imagined a situation where a linguist or
anthropologist is documenting a newly discovered language. The linguist and the speakers
of this language have no language in common. During the documentation visit, a rabbit runs
out of the bushes and in front of the linguist and his informant. The informant points to the
rabbit and says “Gavangi!” You might think that this is the new word for “rabbit” in this
language. But is that necessarily the case?

“Gavangi” could refer to:

 The rabbit
 The colour of the rabbit (say white)
 The rabbit’s fur
 Any other adjective (small, furry, tasty??)
 Any part of the rabbit (ears, tail, etc)
 Any motion the rabbit was doing (say hopping)
 A general exclamation of surprise
 A full sentence (there’s a rabbit that has just jump out of the bush) …

Whole-object assumption

The child is in a similar case to Quine’s linguist – what exact part of the experience is she
meant to attach the word to? Possibilities that the word could refer to: the shape, the
colour, part of the object (leaf / stem), a more general term (like food / fruit), …

One hypothesis that aims to account for a solution to this problem is that children have
certain principles that guide them in this process.

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Whole object assumption = by default, children will apply any new word they hear to the
whole object, no to any part or any attribute. The child will assume, as a working hypothesis,
that the word is linked to the whole object. This can be over-ridden if the child has
conflicting information. However, this is not a hard and fast rule, we will see shortly one
example where this doesn’t work. Where this assumption comes from is an important
question (if true), is it a consequence of other sensory abilities (e.g. we see objects as whole
things and not parts)?

Mutual-exclusivity assumption

However, on its own this assumption can prove problematic. We do have words that refer
to parts of objects, or attributes. So, consider the rabbit again. Say the child has learned the
word “rabbit” and assumed it refers to the whole object. But then it sees the rabbit again,
but this time hears the word “ear”. Using this whole-object assumption – this should refer
to the whole animal. Mutual-exclusivity assumption states that only one word can be
attached to the same object. So, this new word must refer to something else. Maybe the
part of the animal my mum is stroking?

Over- and under-extensions

This kind of problem can lead to some characteristic errors in a young child’s use of words:

1. Overextension: using the word “too widely” (Rescorla 1990)

 Categorical extension: ‘apple’ for ‘peach’ (55% in Rescorla’s study)
 Analogical: ‘cat’ for ‘soft hat’ (19% in Rescorla’s study)
 Statement. ‘doll’ used when looking at the empty doll’s bed (25% in
Rescorla’s study)

2. Underextension: using the word “too narrowly”

 Applying “bird” to a picture of a sparrow, but not to a duck (Anglin, 1977)
 White (1980) – often happens for less prototypical member of a category
 Parents often use superordinate labels for typical members, but not atypical
members

The social-pragmatic theory

The child may not solely have to rely upon these assumptions. The child is existing in a rich
social world and can pick up upon social cues from care-givers to help them associate words
with meanings.

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Moore et al. (1999): social cues vs. Objective saliency
 2-year-old children presented with a new (non-)word (e.g. “moldi”)
 There were two toys that the child saw which this word could refer to
 One of them was gazed at by the adult (social cue)
 The other was made salient by being lit up (objective saliency)
 Comprehension task: a bit later, children were asked to get the “moldi”
 Consistently chose the object the adult had been looking at, instead of the one lit up

Importance: child prioritising social information (adult intention) over other types of
salience.

Child directed speech

One factor that might be important in early stages of child language acquisition is Child
Directed Speech (CDS). Some features:
 Shorter utterance
 Exaggerated intonation
 Restricted vocabularies
 Lots of item-based frames – syntactic templates where different words can be
inserted
o Draw _____________ for _____________

Individual differences

Referential vs. expressive language users

Johanna shows greater reference on object location whereas Caitlin show more social
interaction.

Other reasons for differences

 Difference in language-learning experience

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  First-born babies vs. successive born: first children may speak on behalf of its
younger sibling or maybe the older relies on the younger to communicate.
 Motivation for language learning
 Phonological memory: beyond a minute long, it is difficult to remember different
combination.
 Gender differences
 Socio-economic class

Summary

1. Phonological development
 Babbling stage seems to be important for emergence of phonology
 Canonical vs. variegated babbling
 Developmental issues in phonological development
 From syllables to phonemes
 Typical phonological processes in child speech

2. Lexical development
 Early stages and the “vocabulary explosion”
 Problems in learning new words
 Segmentation problem
 Mapping problem
 Potential answers to the mapping problem
 Individual differences

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