S35MZ

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