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S35MZ
S35MZ
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Young babies seem to have different expectations<br />
about words and sounds in some situations,<br />
but when novel sounds were produced<br />
in a joint attention labelling routine, 13-montholds<br />
treated them just as they treated labels.<br />
But the use of symbols others than words in<br />
word learning is not a matter of all or nothing.<br />
Symbolic input during language acquisition can<br />
be advantageous for children who are learning<br />
new labels less tied to contextual familiarity.<br />
McGregor, Rohlfing, Beand and Marschner<br />
(2009) compared the results of using or not using<br />
symbolic input when teaching to a group of<br />
children, aged 1;8-2;0, the spatial term under.<br />
The outcome of this investigation was that children<br />
who received training supplemented with<br />
symbolic gesture demonstrated more robust<br />
long-term gains in word knowledge compared<br />
to children without symbolic support and to<br />
children whose training was supplemented by<br />
symbolic photographs. One possible explanation<br />
proposed by Goldin-Meadow is that gesture<br />
serves to minimize cognitive load during<br />
moments of language processing. One thing<br />
that is clear is that symbolic gestures are ultimately<br />
useful supports for word learning.<br />
Starting from this conclusion, Zammit and<br />
Schafer (2011) put it into practice and observed<br />
how mothers interacted with their infants (0;10)<br />
and how their communicative style affected the<br />
acquisition of target words. Their data suggest<br />
that children of mothers who produce large<br />
numbers of communicative acts learn words<br />
earlier than children of mothers who produced<br />
fewer communicative acts (these conclusions<br />
are valid for the point at which words are understood<br />
but not yet said). So, this paper supports<br />
the previous one (McGregor et al., 2009) proving<br />
that gestures are actually useful in word<br />
learning and an important element of mother’s<br />
communicative behaviour towards their infants.<br />
A very clear conclusion of this section is that<br />
at the earlier stages, children are able to map<br />
words, gestures and non-linguistic sounds, and<br />
that this capacity narrows as the child grows<br />
Word Learning During First Language Acquisition: Linking Sounds to Referents<br />
accustomed to expect words to refer to realities.<br />
However, gestures continue being useful<br />
during the task of words learning, since they<br />
can be used to help children to understand<br />
words which refer to less concrete realities.<br />
Noun vs. Verb learning<br />
There is a long standing assumption, from traditional<br />
part-of-speech analyses, that nouns<br />
are the largest class of words children learn<br />
and, therefore, easier to learn than other classes<br />
of words such as verbs. Bloom, Tinker and<br />
Margulis (1993) studied the actual status of<br />
object words in early vocabularies by observing<br />
children from 9 months to 2 years of age.<br />
The conclusion they reached was that object<br />
names are not privileged for word learning and<br />
that words other than common nouns predominate<br />
in children’s vocabularies (only one third<br />
of the words children learned were names for<br />
things). Furthermore, many children learned relational<br />
words (such as more, up) and socially<br />
mediated expressions (hi, bye, yes), and this<br />
fact proves that a child can override the wholeobject<br />
constraint (Tomasello & Akhtar, 1995). A<br />
possible answer to this fact could be the Principle<br />
of Relevance and other social-interactional<br />
cues (Tomasello & Akhtar, 1995; Grassmann &<br />
Tomasello, 2007).<br />
Golinkoff, Mervis and Hirsh-Pasek (1994)<br />
examined the claim that lexical acquisition proceeds<br />
in the rapid, relatively effortless way that<br />
it does because the child operates with a set<br />
of principles that guide the task of word learning.<br />
According to them, object names make up<br />
the largest proportion of any word type found<br />
in children’s early lexicons and these principles<br />
explain mainly the acquisition of object-words,<br />
not action words.<br />
A more recent study by Brandone, Pence,<br />
Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek (2007) explores<br />
how children use two possible solutions to the<br />
verb-mapping problem: attention to perceptually<br />
salient actions and attention to social and<br />
Esdrújula. Revista de filología 135