What is the typical age range for children to produce their first words?
Around one year of age.
How many words does a typical 20-month-old child produce on average?
About 150 to 180 words.
What are morphemes?
The basic units of meaning in a language.
At what age do children begin to combine two words?
Around 18 to 24 months.
What are pragmatics in the context of language development?
The social rules and world knowledge that allow speakers to successfully communicate messages.
How many words can normal one-year-old children typically produce?
Ranges from 0 to about 50 words.
How many words does a typical 28-month-old child produce on average?
About 380 words.
About 380 words.
Give an example of overregularization.
Using "mouses" instead of "mice" or "runned" instead of "ran."
What are some common two-word utterances children use?
Possessor–possession (e.g., "Mama dress"), action–object (e.g., "Eat cookie"), agent–action (e.g., "Teddy fall").
Give an example of how children’s pragmatic skills might be inappropriate.
Announcing loudly during a church service that their daddy is trying to sleep.
What types of concepts do children's first words usually refer to?
People, objects, and their own activities.
What activities by caregivers can enhance children's vocabulary growth?
Frequently reading to them and talking about activities they are doing with the child.
What is the term for the tendency to add regular grammatical morphemes to irregular words?
Overregularization.
By what age are most children reasonably accurate with respect to both morphology and syntax?
By 3.5 years of age.
How do children adapt their language when speaking to different listeners?
They simplify their language for younger listeners and use more complex language for peers and adults.
How does a baby’s concept of “animal” differ from an adult’s concept?
A baby’s concept of “animal” may refer to any object that moves by itself.
What is fast mapping?
Using context to make a reasonable guess about a word’s meaning after just one or two exposures.
According to Marcus’s theory, how do children handle regular and irregular past-tense verbs?
They learn a general rule for regular past-tense verbs but store the past tenses for many irregular verbs in memory.
How do children understand who the actor is in the sentence “Pat hit Chris”?
They use word order to determine that "Pat" is the actor.
At what age do children show an understanding of turn-taking in conversations?
As early as two years old.
Who suggested that children's first words may refer to different concepts than adults' words?
Mandler (2006).
How do children’s comprehension of words compare to their production of words?
Children typically understand about twice as many words as they can produce.
At what age do children typically show a substantial decrease in overregularizations?
From preschool age (4%) to fourth grade (1%).
What strategy do children learning Turkish or Polish use to decode the meaning of sentences?
They use the endings of words rather than word-order information.
What did the study by Shatz and Gelman (1973) demonstrate about children's pragmatic skills?
That four-year-olds modify their speech substantially depending on whether the listener is a two-year-old, a peer, or an adult.