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THE PERIOD OF FIRST WORD COMBINATIONS

General Language Developments

A. Rapid increase in production vocabulary (Smith 1926)

B. A gradual onset in the number of multiword utterances (Table 7.1; 4 children)

Two periods:

   1. Early Stage 1. MLU 1.0-1.5; 25-100 recognizable syntactic types

            Children produce idiosyncratic grammars; ends with syntactic spurt

   2. Late Stage 1. MLU 1.5-2.0; > 100-250 syntactic types

            Children establish fundamental aspects of the grammatical system

C. Major Studies–early 70s

   Bloom 1970 Language Development–Eric, Gia, Kathryn

               1973 One Word at a Time–Allison

   Brown 1973–Adam, Eve, Sarah

   Bowerman 1973–Kendall

   Braine 1963–Andrew, Stephen, Gregory

               1976–David, Jonathan

   It is difficult to find children in Early Stage 1:

      Multiword utterance data from Allison at 4 periods

   We have very few language samples from children in Early Stage I

D. Transition to Multiword Utterances–successive single word utterances

   1. Bloom (74) a. chained–refer to different activities, e.g.,

            ‘cow’ (reaching under a chair; = ‘here’s a cow’; 1;4)

            ‘chair’ (putting cow on chair; = ‘I put the cow on the chair’)

            ‘mommy’ (= ‘help me’)

      b. holistic–refer to the same activity, e.g.,

            ‘neck’ (while wearing her coat and pointing to her neck; 1;8)

            ‘up’

      Holistic sequences only appear toward the end of the single word utterance period

   2. Acoustic studies (Fónagy 1972; Branigan 1979) (Table 7.3)

Stage 1: Each word has the same intonational contour and a primary stress. It is only their closeness in time which suggests any relation.

Stage 2: There is still a pause between the words, and each has a primary stress. The terminal falling pitch of the first word, however, is not as great as that for the second one.

Stage 3: The stress on the first word is weaker than that of the second one, and the pause between them is reduced (apparently to less than 500 msec.).

Stage 4: There is no longer a pause between the two words. A succession of two words is still indicated because of: (i) the force of the accents; (ii) frequently a glottal stop occurring between the two words; and (iii) the terminal falling pitch of the first word.

   3. Are successive single word utterances precursors to grammar?

a. Rich Interpretation–yes! The child’s successive single word utterances share common grammatical principles with her later multiword utterances.

      Scollon (1976) vertical construction–holistic sequences of single word utterances

                              horizontal construction–multiword utterances

      Found same transition from two-word utterances to three-word utterances.

b. Lean Interpretation–no! Children rely on conceptual mapping or pragmatics rather than syntax to produce successive single word utterances.

      c. Ingram (1979b) the period from 16-18 months reflect grammatical features

            i. the period occurs a few weeks before the first multiword utterances

            ii. the child produces holistic sequences of single-word utterances

            iii. the period coincides with other linguistic abilities, i.e., the onset of representation

      d. arguments against rich interpretation

            i. children do not have a production restriction

                  children also produce meaningless phonetically consistent forms during this period

Dore, Franklin, Miller & Ramer (1976)–no semantic content; reflect child’s awareness of elements occurring before nouns and verbs

                        e.g., Allison’s /wid6/ (but see Ingram 1979b)

ii. successive single-word utterances do not share the same word order restrictions with later multiword utterances.

      e. Howe (1976) must be careful not to impose adult meanings on children’s first sentences

      f. Bloom (1970) discusses evidence to support interpretations of children’s sentences

            i. the non-linguistic context–what is happening when the child speaks?

            ii. the preceding adult utterances–responses to questions, commands, etc.

            iii. the child’s subsequent utterances–find evidence from build ups and completions

E. General Characteristics

1. Children still produce mostly single-word utterances during the period of first word combinations, e.g., Eric (1;10, MLU 1.42)

            produced 1,043 utterances in seven hour sample; only 165 were multiword utterances

            only 108 were unique syntactic types

Table 7.4 Andrew’s pivot grammar (Braine 1963a)

Pivot constructions

a = ‘Don’t put me down’

b = ‘I don’t want to go mama’

c = ‘I’m not wet’

d = ‘Drive me around some more’

e = ‘There’s more up there’

f = ‘A plane is flying past’

Other utterances

g = Said after the death of Calico the cat

h = Said when the door is shut: ‘The outside is allgone’

F. Syntactic Comprehension–do children know more than they produce?

   1. Shipley, Smith & Gleitman (1969)

      a. Subjects: holophrastic and telegraphic groups of children

      b. Method: mothers gave three types of commands:

      Children scored on whether they touched or looked at the object, or followed the commands

      c. Results (% touch): (Tables 6.12 & 7.6)

‘... all holophrastic speakers obey more often with single-word commands than with well-formed commands’. ‘all telegraphic speakers obey more often with well-formed commands than with single word commands ... The results for VN are similar but less sharp’ (329).

Later claimed study did not directly test syntactic comprehension, but only children’s responses to different types of parent commands.

   2. Sachs & Truswell (1978)

      a. Subjects: 12 children between 1;4 and 2;0 who were only producing single-word utterances

b. Method: presented novel Action + Object sentences combining words in the children’s receptive vocabularies, e.g.,

            Smell truck

            Smell dolly

            Kiss truck

            Kiss dolly

            Each child given an average of 16 commands.

      c. Results: 58% of responses were correct, 16% were incorrect, 6% elicited no response

10 of 11 children receiving four-way minimal contrasts got at least one set correct. The youngest child (1;4) performed correctly on a two-way contrast (‘Kiss horsey’ vs. ‘Kiss teddy’).

d. Conclusion: Children using single-word utterances can understand novel Action + Object commands.

   3. Miller, Chapman, Bronston & Reichle (1980)

      a. Subjects: 12 children aged 10-12 months, 13-15 months, 16-18 months, and 19-21 months

      b. Method: tested the children’s comprehension of eight items (Table 6.13):

      c. Results–number of subjects passing comprehension task (Table 6.14):

   4. Katz, Baker & Macnamara (1974)

      a. Subjects: two experiments with children between 17 and 24 months old

      b. Method: experimenter familiarized children with a pair of dolls in two conditions

            Proper-noun condition: one doll introduced as ‘Zav’, the other doll was ignored

            Common-noun condition: one doll introduced as ‘a zav’, the other doll was ignored

            Tested how children responded to commands to dress, undress, feed Zav/the zav

      c. Results–percentage of times children selected the named doll (Table 7.7)

      d. Conclusion

            i. Girls, but not boys, understood the use of articles with proper and common nouns.

ii. The girls relied on their knowledge of dolls to interpret article use (cognitive explanation) rather than linguistic evidence (distributional explanation). None of the subjects responded correctly when blocks were substituted for dolls.

   5. de Villiers & de Villiers (1973a)

      a. Subjects: seven children in early Stage I (19-24 mos) and 3 in late Stage I (19.5-27 mos)

      b. Method: tested children’s comprehension of active and passive sentences

            Prompt: ‘Make the dog bite the cat’

            Stimuli: semantically reversible sentences, not ‘Make the cow eat the flower’

            Verbs: bite, push, touch, bump, hit, kiss (6 sentences x 4 conditions = 24 total)

      c. Results (Table 7.8):

      d. Conclusions:

            i. Early Stage I children do not understand the basic word order of active sentences

ii. The ‘ability to use word order information in reversible active sentences first appears in late Stage I’ (338).

            iii. Late Stage I children are aware of the difference between active and passive sentences.

   6. Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff (1996, The Origins of Grammar)

a. Subjects: 48 children, 16 to 19 months of age ( ~68 words produced; 22 children were producing multiword utterances) (The experimenters tested 100 children to obtain data from 48 children. Children were eliminated for showing screen preferences or failing to learn basic names.)

      b. Method: Used the intermodal preferential looking paradigm.

                  Tv       light          Tv

                              speaker

                              Child

Child observes different scenes on the tv screens, e.g., Big Bird tickling Cookie Monster and Cookie Monster tickling Big Bird. An observer records the child’s gaze and measures looking time ‘fixation’ and speed ‘latency’. Prediction: children will look longer and sooner at the video matching the audio stimulus.

Experimenters first trained the children the recognize the characters. They then tested the children’s syntactic abilities with four verbs (“tickle”, “feed”, “wash” and “hug”).

            Audio stimuli:

      c. Results: Mean visual fixation times (seconds)

36 of the 48 children looked at the matching videos significantly longer than at the nonmatching videos.

The girls looked at the matching videos longer for all four verbs while the boys only looked at the matching videos longer for the verbs “tickle” and “feed”.

The children’s linguistic level (single-word vs. multiword productions) did not predict their performance.

d. Conclusion: Some children in Stage I demonstrate an understanding of word order. Their understanding may be affected by the meanings of specific verbs.