3. Children Acquisition
1.1.1.1 Naming: one-word utterances
When do children start to say their first words? It may surprise you to learn that research on this basic question is not at all conclusive. This is not only because there is a very wide range of individual differences but also because the precise determination of just when a word has been learned is not easy to make and is not standardized.
The mere uttering of speech sounds by the child, e.g. ‘mama’, may or may not indicate word knowledge. Children can be said to have learned
their first word when (1) they are able to utter a recognizable speech form, and when (2) this is done in conjunction with some object or event in the environment. The speech form may be imperfect, e.g. ‘da’ for ‘daddy’, and the associated meaning may be incorrect, e.g. all people are called ‘da’, but, as long as the child uses the speech form reliably, it may be concluded that the child has acquired some sort of word knowledge.
First words have been reported as appearing in children from as young as 4 months to as old as 18 months, or even older. On average, it would seem that children utter their first word around the age of 10 or 12 months. Some of this variability has to do with physical development, such as the musculature of the mouth, which is essential for the proper articulation of sounds. Certain brain development is also involved since the creation of speech sounds must come under the control of speech areas in the cerebral cortex (Bates et al., 1992).
It appears that children first use nouns as proper nouns to refer to specific objects (Moskowitz, 1978), after which they may or may not extend the meaning correctly for common nouns (Clark, 1973). For example, while ‘dada’ may first be used to identify one particular person, it may or may not be extended to include all men or all people. Or, ‘wow-wow’ may be used to refer to one dog, and then be extended to refer to all animals, soft slippers, or people in furs. In time, of course, the proper restrictions and extensions are learned.
1.1.1.2 Holophrastic function: one-word utterances
However, children do not only use single words to refer to objects; they also use single words to express complex thoughts that involve those objects. A young child who has lost its mother in a department store may cry out ‘mama’, meaning ‘I want mama’. Or a child may point to a shoe and say ‘mama’, meaning ‘The shoe belongs to mama’. Research has shown that the young child can express a variety of semantic functions and complex ideas by the use of single words (Bloom, 1973; Greenfield and Smith, 1976; Scollon, 1976). In such cases, the child uses a single word to express the thought for which mature speakers will use a whole sentence. It is because of this whole sentence function that this aspect of one-word speech is often referred to as ‘holophrastic’, where ‘holo’ indicates whole, and ‘phras’ indic- ates phrase or sentence.
Actually, it is quite remarkable how inventive children can be in the use of single words. Researchers have noted that children may describe a com- plex situation by using a series of single-word holophrases. For example, ‘peach, Daddy, spoon’ was used to describe a situation where Daddy had cut a piece of peach that was in a spoon (Bloom, 1973), and ‘car, go, bus’ was used to describe a situation in which hearing the sound of a car re- minded the child that she had been on a bus the day before (Scollon, 1976). These strings of words are not yet sentences, because at the end of each
word the child pauses slightly and uses a falling intonation of the sort that is used by mature speakers to signal the completion of a sentence.
It is often not easy, of course, to interpret what a child is intending to convey by the single word. And, while knowing the child, the child’s previ- ous experiences, and elements of the present situation will serve to aid in the interpretation of an utterance, even the most attentive parents are fre- quently unable to interpret utterances that their children produce. Incident- ally, we often use the traditional term ‘utterance’ rather than ‘sentence’ in order to avoid disputes as to whether what the child says is truly a sentence or whether it is grammatical. The advantage of the term ‘utterance’ is that it describes what the child says without having to worry about assigning sentencehood or grammaticality to what was said.