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Early Word Production: A Study of One Child’s Word Productions
Katryn Sheppard
Portland State University
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Abstract
Early word production, one of the initial stages of language development
in children, plays an important role in the development of later
language skills. This study identifies the word classes and number of
words spoken in a recorded interaction (Bloom, 1973) by one normally
developing child of sixteen months and analyzes aspects of the child’s
speech, with the goal of noting if the characteristics observed were
supported by the existing research on early word production or if they
deviated from those findings. The words that I analyzed fell into six
categories: nouns, spatial terms, adjectives, negatives, social phrases,
and verbs. Although the frequency with which the child used words
from some of these categories reflected the expectations established
by previous research, her use of words in other categories was less
predictable. Noting word usage in the six categories led to an analysis
of the functions that those categories served in the child’s semantic
communication at this early stage of language development.
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250 words or fewer.
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EARLY WORD PRODUCTION 3
Early Word Production: A Study of One Child’s Word Productions
Introduction
Each step in the course of language development and acquisition in
children provides a foundation for later skills and eventual mastery of
the language. Early word production, a stage of language development in
which children have only a few words in their vocabularies, provides the
foundation for later vocabulary building and language production and
has been shown to be closely linked to later language performance skills
(Walker, Greenwood, Hart, & Carta, 1994). The early word production
stage is therefore worthy of examination, as it “signals that children
have a new tool that will enable them to learn about and participate
more fully in their society” (Uccelli & Pan, 2013, p. 95).
Because so few words are produced by children in this early stage,
the analysis of their word production focuses on the particular word
classes and how frequently each class of words appears in speech. When
examining typically developing English-speaking children who have
few words in their productive vocabulary, Bates et al. (1994) found that
the words produced were most often nouns, while other categories
more seldom appeared. These less frequent categories included verbs
and closed-class words. Closed-class words are function words, which
include the categories of articles, conjunctions, numbers, pronouns, and
prepositions; they are called closed-class words because new members
cannot be added to these categories.
Reporting on the most common kinds of the nouns uttered in
early vocabularies, Nelson (1973) found that children “began by naming
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objects exhibiting salient properties of change whether as the result
of the child’s own action . . . or independent of it” (p. 1). In other words,
nouns that point to consistent, concrete objects are most prevalent in
early speech, because “children learn to name and understand categories
that are functionally relevant to them” (Anglin, 1995, p. 165)—they learn
to name the objects they see and interact with day to day.
Although nouns make up the largest percentage of the words
produced by children in the earlier stages of language acquisition, other
word classes like verbs and adjectives also appear. While they do occur
in children’s first fifty words, “verbs, adjectives, and function words each
account for less than 10 percent” of total utterances (Uccelli & Pan, 2013,
p. 96). Infrequent use of these categories supports the idea that, while
all word classes are represented, nouns are still expected to occur most
often.
Other lexical items that can be found in the speech of children
with limited vocabulary are words indicating spatial relationships, how
things relate to one another in physical space. According to Bowerman
(2007), “children’s earliest spatial words are topological forms like ‘in’
and ‘on’” (p. 177). This observation supports the hypothesis that those
prepositions are among the first lexical items children acquire (Brown,
1973; Zukowski, 2013).
Overall, the research on early word production in children who are
just beginning to acquire their first language has found that the majority
of words produced will be nouns that refer to concrete objects. According
to Pine (1992), children frequently use their early words to describe or
EARLY WORD PRODUCTION 4
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label, or to do both. Pine concluded that “children are making referential
statements about the world with the kind of vocabulary items which
they happen to have available to them” (p. 53). That is, children try to
comment on referents (the things that words stand for) in various ways
using just the limited language skills that they possess in their early
stage of development.
Taking into account prior research on the early words children
produce, I analyzed the classes and categories of words that appear
in a transcript of a young child speaking. I wanted to compare this
particular child’s speech with what is expected during this early stage of
language development, knowing that research predicts a higher number
of nouns than other word classes in the data. I was interested to know
whether nouns would occur as frequently as the literature would have
me believe, and whether or not spatial terms would appear in such
early speech. Furthermore, I wanted to note whether verbs occur as
infrequently as expected and, if so, what words the child used instead of
verbs to convey action.
Method
The transcript that I chose to analyze is one sample from a series
of six recordings by Bloom (1973) of her daughter, Allison, a normally
developing, English-speaking child. Allison’s age in the samples ranged
from 1 year 4 months and 21 days to 2 years and 10 months. The
transcript that I analyzed was the earliest of these. Information about
the socioeconomic status of Allison and her family was not available in
the transcript or the North American English manual of the CHILDES
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database (MacWhinney, 2000), from which the transcript came.
However, we can assume the family was from the professional class, as
Bloom was a professor at Columbia University.
According to information in the CHILDES manual, the recordings
took place in the Audio-Visual Studio at Teachers College, Columbia
University, in a room that contained some furniture and toys. The
sessions were conducted with audio-recording devices alone; as a result,
no videos were available through the CHILDES database. Each recording
session lasted 40 minutes, for a total of four hours of recording. Bloom
(1973) describes her role in the interaction as “more investigator than
mother” (p. 11), but the interactions seem to have been more relaxed
than one associates with investigators and not structured according to
a test or other prearranged activity. Rather, the interactions were led by
the child’s actions in relation to her mother and objects in the room.
The data are organized in six separate transcripts, arranged
chronologically. They contain the actual utterances and morphological
notation indicating the parts of speech being used. Bloom initially
transcribed the recordings, and later Lois Hood, a fellow researcher,
revised the transcript, which was revised again by a larger group of
researchers that also included Hood. Each time, the researchers added
notes to provide situational context. Each line of the transcript is
numbered, and there was an attempt to divide the data in a way that
reflected where there was “a shift in topic or focus” (Bloom, 1973,
p. 11).
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Results
During the 40-minute exchange between Bloom and Allison,
Allison produced a total of 362 occurrences of identifiable words. I did
not distinguish between single- and multi-word utterances because
that distinction was not relevant to the purpose of this study. Not all
of Allison’s turns in the conversation were intelligible; only intelligible
words were included in my analysis. Altogether, I identified 27 different
words (types) used by the subject, although there were many repetitions
(tokens) of words. I assigned the 27 words to six categories: nouns, spatial
terms, adjectives, negatives, social phrases, and verbs.
The category of nouns contained the largest number of distinct
words or types as well as the largest number of instances or tokens, as
shown in Figure 1. Allison used a total of 12 nouns, and all reflected
concrete concepts. These included household objects, nouns that
referenced people, and the names of animals referring to toys present at
the time of recording. The most frequently used noun was “baby” (n=25);
“chair” was second (n= 24). The total number of nouns represented 122
occurrences, or 34% of the total words uttered.
The second most frequent category of words found in Allison’s
utterances was spatial terms. Five different spatial terms, or types,
occurred, with “up” being the most common (n= 48). All of the spatial
terms Allison used referred to her immediate surroundings—for
example, the chair that she wanted to climb “up” or “down” from.
Altogether, 120 of Allison’s words were spatial words, accounting for 33%
of her speech by word count.
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The third most frequently used category of words in the data was
adjectives, of which there were three types. Although “more” was the
most frequently occurring adjective, “gone” was also often repeated.
I will elaborate on the special role that adjectives played in Allison’s
speech in the discussion and conclusion section.
Negatives also appeared with some frequency in Allison’s speech,
although the category comprised only one type: “no.” The word occurred
28 times (n=28), sometimes referring back to and negating other words
that she had previously spoken, at other times negating the word or
words that followed. The level of emphasis Allison placed on the word
varied: sometimes her utterance was transcribed as “no”; other times, it
Figure 1. Words uttered by the subject, by word category (n=362). Data
recorded in transcripts by L. Bloom (1973), accessed through the CHILDES
database (MacWhinney, 2000).
. Figure is numbered, and a description and source informa- tion are given.
34% Nouns
33% Spatial Terms
18% Adjectives
8% Negatives
6% Social Phrases
1% Verbs
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was transcribed more emphatically, with an exclamation point, as “no!”
This negative term accounted for 8% of her total words.
The remaining categories, social phrases and verbs, occurred less
frequently. Social phrases—terms or utterances that are appropriately
used in specific social contexts—were present in the transcript in two
different words: “uhoh” (n= 20), and “oh” (n= 3). Together, these add up to
a total of 23 words in the transcript that were social phrases.
The category of verbs was by far the least common in the subject’s
production. Four different verbs were used, three of which occurred only
a single time. “Stop” was used twice, while “turn,” “climb,” and “sit” were
each used once. A total of five words (n=5) were identified as verbs.
Discussion and Conclusion
Allison’s single-word utterances fell into six identifiable categories,
the frequency of which varied considerably. Some categories contained
only a few items that were not repeated often, while other words and
categories of words showed up repeatedly. Allison’s tendency to use
words in certain categories matches the findings of the existing research
literature on child language production. In other instances, Allison’s use
of words differed slightly from what might be expected.
As predicted, nouns made up a large portion of Allison’s speech.
Since researchers have found the majority of early words to be nouns,
it was not surprising that Allison used the greatest number of different
words within the noun category and likewise showed the greatest
number of repeated tokens in this category. Furthermore, the kinds of
nouns Allison used are also in line with the finding that children in
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the early stages of language acquisition focus on concrete concepts. All
of the nouns that Allison used referred to things in the room where
the recording took place, mostly common objects that she could draw
attention to. For instance, Allison used the noun “baby” when she
wanted to communicate something to her mother about a baby doll she
wanted to play with.
The category of spatial terms also accounted for a large percentage
of the words Allison produced. The most frequent utterance of any word
in any category in the transcript was of the word “up.” That word, like
other spatial terms, was often repeated and sometimes took the place
of a more complex construction, as when the subject said “up” as she
was struggling to get up onto the chair and “down” when she wished to
get back down. Allison’s choice of words fits with Bowerman’s (2007)
descriptions of children’s first spatial terms: “early acquired spatial
words revolve around relationships of . . . verticality (up, down)” (p. 180).
This use of spatial terms contrasts with more complex spatial terms
that appear in later development. However, the fact that Allison used
five different words within the spatial word category could suggest that
those terms play several important roles in her communication at this
early stage.
As previously noted, adjectives like “gone” and “more” were words
that played important roles in Allison’s speech when she wanted to
convey something to her mother, as when she finished eating a cookie
and repeatedly told her mother “more.” This single word seemed to stand
in for a more elaborate question or request Allison could not produce
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at this stage, such as “Give me more.” “Gone” was also used repeatedly
in the same context to refer to the cookie. The use of “gone” to describe
what had happened to the cookie might be seen as evidence of Pine’s
(1992) observation that children’s early words are used to label and
describe objects around them.
While the category of adjectives did not form as large a portion
of Allison’s speech as either nouns or spatial words, it was somewhat
surprising that adjectives composed 18% of total words in this transcript.
Generally, adjectives and other word classes that are not nouns are
expected to account for a much smaller percentage of words spoken in
early word production (Bates et al., 1994).
One feature of Allison’s utterances that did adhere to what
is expected for a typical child at this age was her use of negatives.
Although she used only one negative word—“no”—the word was
repeated frequently enough to be the fourth most common category in
the transcript. Her use of “no” rather than any other negative conformed
to Brown’s (1973) finding that other forms of negation like “not” and
“don’t” appear only in later stages of linguistic development. In this very
early stage, Allison’s reliance on “no” alone seems typical.
There were varied contexts in which Allison used “no.” In some
cases, the word seemed to convey a lack of something, as when she
uttered “cookie,” looked around for the cookies, and then said “no.” This
sequence of events might indicate that Allison was conveying the lack
of cookies to her mother. A similar exchange revolved around a picture
of a girl, when Allison turned the picture over and, upon finding the
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other side was blank, said “no,” evidently trying to convey that there
was nothing on that side of the picture. On other occasions, “no” was
produced as an answer to a question. In one example, Bloom asked
Allison if the cup was for her (i.e., Bloom), to which the girl replied
“no” and took the cup back from her mother. While adhering to the
use of the single, simple form of negation that might be expected,
Allison’s utterances of “no” were varied in purpose and effective in
communicating a range of ideas.
The remaining categories, social phrases and verbs, made up only a
small percentage of Allison’s words. Social words appeared infrequently
and sometimes were attached to other words, as when the subject said
“uhoh there.” The infrequency of social phrases in Allison’s early speech
reflects typical aspects of early vocabulary development. As Santelmann
(2014) explained, at this stage in a child’s linguistic development, nearly
all lexical items will be nouns and adjectives, with a limited number of
social phrases.
True to previous research findings, verbs formed the least
frequently used category in Allison’s speech. Allison used the four
different verbs to describe what something was in the act of doing or
what she intended to do. For example, she used “stop” to describe a toy
car coming to a stop. The remaining three verbs were produced when
Allison was performing an action herself, as when she said “turn” when
she was turning the pages of a book, “climb” when she was trying to
climb up onto the chair, and “sit” when she was going to sit on the chair.
Although four different verbs showed up in Allison’s speech, the total
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number of tokens from the verb category was significantly lower than
for any of the other word categories. This follows what researchers
generally expect of children’s early speech, which includes only a small
percentage of verbs (Uccelli & Pan, 2013).
While Allison used these four verbs to communicate action, she
often used other words to convey the same meaning. For example,
Allison used “up” in two different contexts. The first was in narrating
an action she was performing, as when she said “up” while attempting
to get up onto the chair. The second was as a request to Bloom to help
her up. Allison also used the spatial term “down” to indicate similar
intentions.
When not using spatial terms in place of more specific verbs,
Allison used nouns to communicate intention and action. For example,
one instance of her uttering the word “cookie” was to tell to her
mother that she wanted a cookie, indicating this intention without
using any verb. This pattern occurred in other contexts, as when she
used the concrete noun “chair” but not the verb “sit” to indicate that
she wanted to get onto the chair. The use of nouns instead of verbs
when communicating certain concepts is perhaps expected, given the
established preponderance of nouns in early word production. It also
supports the idea that children communicate using the tools at hand
(Pine, 1992): since Allison frequently employed nouns and spatial terms,
it would seem that those are the tools that she had to rely on to convey
whole hosts of meaning.
The results of my analysis of the transcript of Allison interacting
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with Bloom revealed aspects of the child’s speech that were mostly
in line with the established features of early word production. The
frequency of the use of different word classes conformed to previous
findings that concrete nouns are most common, but other categories
varied from the expected patterns. Her choice of the spatial terms “up”
and “down” and the simple negative “no” is typical of children at this
age. However, the uncommon frequency of adjectives in her speech
indicates that they are important to how she communicated certain
meanings; like spatial terms, they often filled in for verbs in cases where
the actual verb was beyond her vocabulary. Her use of verbs, while
predictably limited, showed how she employed the few verbs that she
had and how she conveyed meaning when she did not have the precise
verbs available to her. Overall, Allison used a somewhat varied set of
words to communicate a wide range of meanings even though she had
only a limited vocabulary to work with.
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