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When is a word a word?
1Department of Special Education, Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond, LA 70402.
Journal of Child Language
|October 1, 1994
Summary
Identifying early childhood words is challenging. This study proposes new methods for recognizing these first words, finding that context-bound word use can be encouraged, but flexible word use timing is innate.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Speech-Language Pathology
Background:
- Identifying the earliest words in child speech development is a significant challenge.
- Early vocalizations often include non-word sounds alongside nascent words.
- Existing methods for identifying early words lack explicit criteria.
Purpose of the Study:
- To propose explicit and inclusive procedures for identifying the earliest words in child speech.
- To establish criteria for word identification based on phonetic and contextual parameters.
- To analyze the development of context-bound versus context-flexible word use.
Main Methods:
- Development of a formal system for evaluating phonetic match of early vocalizations.
- Creation of child-derived functional categories to assess word use in context.
- Longitudinal analysis of word use in two samples of 10 children (aged 0;9 to 1;4).
Main Results:
- Context-bound words, which are tied to specific situations, can be influenced by focused language elicitation.
- The emergence of context-flexible words, used in varied situations, appears independent of such training.
- The proposed identification procedures offer a systematic approach to studying early word acquisition.
Conclusions:
- Explicit phonetic and contextual criteria are crucial for accurately identifying early child words.
- Early language intervention strategies may effectively promote context-bound vocabulary growth.
- The developmental trajectory of context-flexible word use suggests an intrinsic maturational component.