Two-Word Stage

7 Key excerpts on "Two-Word Stage"

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  Introducing Linguistics

  Theoretical and Applied Approaches

  • Joyce Bruhn de Garavito, John W. Schwieter(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  12.5.1 The One-word Stage When you think about it, we see the development of L1 syntax when children use a single word in cases where adults would say several words. We call this the one-word stage. These single words are called holophrases. For example, at around 12 to 18 months, a child may say, juice to make a request for more juice to be served. Perhaps this is not surprising because they do not yet know the syntax to construct the full sentence I want juice let alone Can I have some juice? Other holophrase examples include: Daddy for I want daddy; Up for Pick me up; and Gone for The cereal is gone. Research has shown, however, that children do not choose which word to be the holophrase randomly. The word is the most meaningful word in the adult equivalent. 12.5.2 The Two-Word Stage A few months after speaking in one-word utterances, by around 24 months of age, chil- dren enter a Two-Word Stage. Some of the first two-word utterances may in fact be two holophrases from the one-word stage such as juice gone. Soon after this, though, they will begin to create other two-word utterances that are syntactically ordered correctly, meaningful, and context-appropriate. Examples of utterances in the Two-Word Stage can be seen in Table 12.11. The table also shows that we can characterize the examples by several relational meanings. Relational meaning refers to the semantic relationship between the referents of the two words in question. Roger Brown (1973) showed that children use eight different rela- tional meanings in the Two-Word Stage. TABLE 12.11 Examples of Two-word Utterances Child utterance Intended meaning Relational meaning Daddy shirt Daddy is putting on a shirt. agent + action bounce ball I bounced the ball. action + theme doggy water The doggy has water. agent + theme Mommy bed Mommy is on the bed. agent + location 435 12.5 Syntactic Development 12.5.3 The Telegraphic Stage You may have been expecting a three-word stage to come next.

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  Educational Psychology N5 SB

  TVET FIRST

  • M Adam(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  • Begins to say single-word utterances to express complex ideas. • Produces simple utterances to express complex ideas. • Non-grammatical, forms the foundation of a child’s vocabulary. • Used in conjunction with body language, context and tone of voice. • The child moves to the next stage once he or she can speak in successive one-word sentences. Advice for parents during this stage: • Engage in constant conversation with the child. • Reciprocate responses from the child positively. • Avoid using baby language, e.g. “woof-woof” for “dog”. • “Food” may mean ‘Give me food”. • “Up” may mean “Pick me up”. • “Play” may mean “I want to play now”. Telegraphic (two-word) stage 18–24 months • The child uses simple two-word sentences. • Sentences have a predicate and a subject. • General language, syntax and word learning occurs. Advice for parents during this stage: • Repeat what the child says in a complete, grammatically correct sentence. • Use short, simple phrases to help the child learn proper grammar. • Use sentences that you would use with an adult. • “Doggie walk” may mean “The dog is being walked”. • “Daddy shoe” may mean “Daddy’s shoe”. • “Baby shoe” may mean “My shoe”. • “Mummy eat” may mean “Did mummy eat?” • “Baby sleeping” may mean “Baby is sleeping”. holophrastic: expressing a whole phrase or thought in a single word telegraphic: very concise, leaving out any words that are not essential; in this context, using short, two-word phrases 66 Name of stage Age of child Description Examples Multi-word stage 24–36 months • Sentences become longer and more complex. • Characterised by more complex sentence structure. • Sentences include plurals and past tenses. • Children leave out “unnecessary” words like conjunctions and prepositions. • Self-centred and used mainly to express children’s own needs and desires. Advice for parents during this stage: • Talk and listen to the child. • Sing songs together. • Answer questions in fluent sentences.

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  How Children Learn to Write

  Supporting and Developing Children′s Writing in School

  • Dorothy Latham(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  really, however, frankly and so on. In addition, he says that the child has to learn ‘that there are layers in the interpretation of a sentence that are not immediately apparent from perceiving the form of the sentence.’ He goes on to say that sentences do not always mean what they seem to mean, and that it is only when this process starts that children begin to appreciate the possible effects that can be produced in the use of language, such as idiom, and jokes, riddles and puns. Comprehension, of course, often involves the use of inferences to gain the full meaning of a passage, in more mature levels of text, such as those used in the upper Key Stage 2 years and onwards. Crystal reports that at about that stage the nature of the language learning process alters radically, along with some evidence that the ability to learn foreign languages differs from pre-puberty to post-puberty, becoming more difficult to acquire. He speculates that while pre-puberty speech may be more homogenous, the use of speech post-puberty shows greater idiosyncrasy and inventiveness, although evidence for this is rather limited. Finally Crystal reminds us that the learning of vocabulary and style is never-ending and is a lifelong process (Crystal, 1982).

  Bancroft suggests a further convention comprising just two stages, over and above that of the stages just outlined, and one which makes a watershed division between the stages of telegraphic speech and speech which employs grammatical markers and inflections (Bancroft, 1995, in Lee and Das Gupta).

  □ Linguistic Universals and Related Theories

  Altmann outlines two goals involved in the study of language acquisition, firstly, understanding the gaining of knowledge about individual words, and secondly, understanding the gaining of knowledge about how words combine to form meaningful sentences (Altmann, 1997). The latter must include not only grammar, but also the structure of meaning through the putting together of words, and there are several theories concerning this aspect of language acquisition. These have generally looked at patterns common to many or all languages, termed universals, which underlie the processes involved and the observations we are able to make of children’s developing speech.

  In the first part of the twentieth century, the ideas of Piaget began to play a prominent part in views of children’s cognitive and language development. He stressed the important role that the child plays in his own development through his actions. The mechanism for learning in Piaget’s theory was that of adaptation. We adapt our knowledge and understanding through accommodating new information, sometimes modifying it as we link it to previous learning if it does not quite fit, so that elements of conflict between new and old learning cause us to move forward in our understanding (Piaget, 1959; Das Gupta and Richardson, 1995, in Lee and Das Gupta; Bremner, 1999, in Messer and Millar).

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  Introducing Second Language Acquisition

  Perspectives and Practices

  • Kirsten M. Hummel(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Babbling occurs early on, and at approximately the first year mark, the child's first recognizable word may appear. At around the 50‐word vocabulary mark, children appear to begin to string two words together, and vocabulary and grammatical development accelerates thereafter. Children's grammatical development has been measured in terms of MLU, calculated in terms of morphemes per utterance. Brown (1973) found that children differ in rate of MLU development, although they acquire forms in a similar order. It has also been established that children tend to make typical errors, including overgeneralizing rules, as in using “mouses” instead of “mice.” They also may go through a period in which word meanings are overextended (“dog” for all four‐footed animals) and/or underextended (“dog” only for the family pet). There are considerable differences in learning a first language as an infant and learning a second language after a first language has been acquired. Many of the differences are related to age and cognitive developmental factors. Others are related to the very fact that for L2 acquisition one language is already available to enable basic communication and the expression of needs and desires. On the other hand, despite these remarkable differences, there is much about the two processes that is similar: similar patterns of development, similar errors, similar strategies that mark developmental stages

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  Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language

  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hugh J. Silverman(Authors)
  • 1979(Publication Date)
  • Northwestern University Press

    (Publisher)

  In this case, as in other less clear-cut situations, we are talking about a true organization of imitated models and never of pure and simple reception and reproduction. (We will examine this problem of imitation further.) B. After Three Years Can we distinguish other stages that follow? This seems difficult to do. Stern has distinguished the passing from word to sentence. However, this is not a very well-defined stage, since the first words always have a sentence value, even though the strict distinction is debatable. Other people distinguish different stages according to the growth of vocabulary and take stock of the child's linguistic knowledge at different ages. There have been a number of studies 20 / CONSCIOUSNESS AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION of this nature with disconcerting and always disappointing re- sults. Mme Descoeudres evaluated the vocabulary of children at about three and a half years and on this basis established tests to avoid the necessity of repeating the evaluation each time. 17 The results are varied. (Stern found 300 words at two years; Deville, 688; Major, 142.) What is the reason for this diversity of results? I. There is a lack of an exact definition of what must count as a word. (Do two suffixes for one root count as two words, or one word? The same for flectional endings, etc.) 2. The working vocabulary of an adult, as well as a child, is muoh more limited than the vocabulary he understands or which he would know how to use if he really felt the necessity. (Vendryes has said that this virtual vocabulary is impossible to inventory.) 18 One ,cannot consider linguistic equipment as a summation of words. Rather, we must appeal to systems of varia- tion that render an open series of words possible. This cannot be explored further here. It is a totality of open sectors with infinite possibilities of expression.

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  Childhood Bilingualism

  Research on Infancy through School Age

  • Peggy McCardle, Erika Hoff, Peggy McCardle, Erika Hoff(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Multilingual Matters

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 When Infants Hear Two Languages: Interpreting Research on Early Speech Perception by Bilingual Children ANNE FERNALD Studies exploring fundamental issues in child language acquisition now number in the thousands, and the majority of these focus on aspects of lin-guistic competence that develop over the first three years of life (see Clark, 2003). However, children learning more than one language are poorly rep-resented in this literature. Although most people in the world grow up in multilingual environments (Grosjean, 1982), only about 2% of basic research on language development includes children learning two languages (Bhatia & Ritchie, 1999). And given the strong applied emphasis in this area, the focus has been primarily on school-aged children, with little attention to bilingual learning in the early years. Only recently have researchers interested in the early stages of learning begun to explore speech processing by infants growing up with two languages, bringing new perspectives and experimental paradigms to the study of bilingual development. The goal in this commentary is first to contrast three major traditions in basic research on early language development along two key dimensions – how they characterize and measure language competence at different ages in their studies, and the extent to which each is concerned with features of the early language environment that might influence the child’s emerging linguistic abilities. I then focus on recent investigations of speech perception by infants in monolingual environments, outlining some of the challenges we face in extending this research to infants in mul-tilingual environments. Since a number of recent findings show that infants hearing two languages perform differently in speech perception experiments than do infants hearing only one (see Werker, Weikum and 19

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  Little Kids, Big Dilemmas

  Your parenting problems solved by science

  • Sarah Kuppen(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  fruit pot that are not actually two word combinations. Here, the child has learned the two words as one and so they lose flexibility as individual items.

  How can I help my child to make two word combinations?

  If you would like to encourage word combinations, and your child already has a small spoken vocabulary, you can try to model some two word examples. You could try making this into a teasing game, where your child can use her own name (if they can say it!), which might make it more fun. So you could say ‘Mummy’s teddy’ and if they respond with a shake of the head and say ‘No! Fred teddy’, great; or if they just say ‘No’, you can model a desired response for them or make it into a question, ‘Mummy’s teddy?’

  Language development at two and three

  Over the ages of two and three, your child will make great leaps in the length and complexity of her spoken language. Again, there is a wide range in terms of what is normal. Some children will be producing telegraphic speech, which consists mostly of noun and verb combinations. Others will be saying full sentences of 20 words or more. Beyond the age of three, language is well established and your child will demonstrate the basics of grammar, which will continue to develop into the school years.

  Around the ages of two and three, you may notice a gradual change in the social and communicative nature of your relationship. Talking together means that you can both express your wants and needs. It may also be possible to come to agreeable solutions through reasoning, negotiation or striking a bargain.

  Children of this age are managing some big feelings, and the development of speech can allow these to be communicated. The sharing of frustration, anger and sadness can increase your feelings of closeness. Not only is talking fundamental in the development of family relationships, it is also important for establishing relationships in the outside world. This is particularly key if your child is participating in play groups, group child minding, or is in a nursery setting. The communication of wants and needs allows your child to relax in the knowledge that she will be catered for, and may lower any feelings of anxiety she may have. It can also minimise the need to resort to physical outbursts.

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