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Running head: EARLY WORD PRODUCTION 1

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: 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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