30 research outputs found
Parent-Child Interaction and Lexical Acquisition in two Domains: Color Words and Animal Names
This paper explores young children’s and parents’ use of color words and animal names in two published studies. The aim is to compare the ranges and kinds of these words in parentchild interaction and to consider the implications of these findings for our understanding of early lexical development. Color term data were drawn from the Gleason corpus in CHILDES: 12 boys and 12 girls ranging in age from 25-62 months, and their parents. Results showed that parents used and emphasized only the same 10 most basic colors, with many teaching episodes. Parents’ most frequent terms, red, blue, and green were also children’s most frequent terms and are the ones acquired earliest according to MacArthur Bates lexical norms. In the second study CLAN programs were used to identify animal names in corpora from a variety of families in CHILDES, with 44 children ranging in age from 1;6-6;2. Children and parents produced a remarkable number and range of animal terms, with individual preschoolers naming as many as 96 different, often rare, animals, such as crocodile and pelican. Parents and children thus attend to the same limited set of basic color terms. By contrast, biophilia, our shared human love of the living world is reflected in children’s extensive animal lexicon
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The Relationship of Play Activity and Gender to Parent and Child Sex-typed Communication
The influence of contextual factors on parent-child interactions, and the role of these factors in the incidence of gender differences in communication, was examined. Twelve daughters and twelve sons (mean age = 43 months) visited a university laboratory on separate occasions, once with their mothers and once with their fathers. During both visits, the parent-child pair played with a relatively masculine-stereotyped toy set, oriented toward construction play (a take-apart car), and a relatively feminine-stereotyped toy set, oriented toward social-dramatic play (props for a grocery store). Transcripts of the parent and child speech acts were coded while listening to audiotape recordings of the interactions. The results indicated that the play activity, and not the speaker's gender, significantly affected both parents' and children's use of different speech acts. Parent gender was an additional predictor of children's speech. All of the significant effects had large effect sizes. The findings support theoretical models and other research reports that emphasise the importance of activity settings in the sex-typing process
The Development of Language (7th Edition)
This authoritative text is ideal for courses that take a developmental approach to language acquisition across the full life span, from infancy through the aging process. The text thoroughly explores syntax, morphology, semantics, phonology, and pragmatics. It examines atypical development with attention to the most common disorders affecting language acquisition, presents strong coverage of individual differences in language acquisition and learning, describes how and why they occur, and provides contemporary references and the most recent research findings. The panel of expert authors provides students with cutting-edge research knowledge in an interesting and highly readable format. The goal is the best and most up-to-date information for the student, with guides for further exploration of topics of interest.The emphasis on change over the life span is even more important to students from all fields, since it reinforces current developments in cognitive neuroscience that indicate language, once acquired, is not static, but rather, undergoes constant neural reorganization