Parent-Child Interaction and Lexical Acquisition in two Domains: Color Words and Animal Names

• Autorzy: Jean Berko Gleason
• Języki publikacji: EN

Abstrakty

EN

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.

Słowa kluczowe

EN

animal names; biophilia; color terms; lexical acquisition; parent-child interaction

• Wydawca: Sciendo
• Czasopismo: Psychology of Language and Communication
• Rocznik: 2014
• Tom: 18
• Numer: 3
• Strony: 204-210

Daty

wydano

2014-11-01

online

2014-12-30

Twórcy

autor

Jean Berko Gleason

• Boston University,

Bibliografia

• Berlin, B. & Kay, P. (1969). Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Fenson, L., Dale, P.S., Reznick, J.S., Bates, E., Thal, D.J., & Pethick, S.J. (1994). Variability in early communicative development. Monograph of the Society for Research in Child Development, 59 (5), 1-173
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• Ely, R. & Gleason, J. Berko (1998). What color is the cat? Color words in parentchild conversations. In A. Aksu-Koc, E. Erguvanli-Taylan, A. Sumru Ozsoy, & A. Kuntay (Eds.), Perspectives on Language Acquisition: Selected Papers from the VIIth International Congress for the Study of Child Language (pp. 169-178). Istanbul: Boğaziçi University.
• Gleason, J. Berko, Ely, R., Phillips, B., & Zaretsky, E. (2009). Alligators all around: The acquisition of animal terms in English and Russian. In D. Guo & E. Lieven (Eds.), Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Psychology of Language: Research in the Tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin (pp. 17-26 ). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Fenson, L., Marchman, V., Thal, D., Dale, P., Reznick, S., & Bates, E. (2007). The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories: User’s Guide and Technical Manual (2nd ed.). Baltimore, MD: Paul Brookes.
• Kellert, S.R. & Wilson, E.O. (Eds.) (1993). The Biophilia Hypothesis. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.
• Miller, G.A. & Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1976). Language and Perception. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Phillips, B., Gleason, J. Berko, & Ely, R. (2014). Look at the kitty: Parents’ use of attentional directives in speech to young children. Manuscript under review.

Identyfikatory

DOI

10.2478/plc-2014-0014