Child Learning Strategies

Child Learning Strategies

Although there are many variations in the way in which children learn language, there are ample similarities. These suggest underlying strategies that differ with the language level of a child. In the following section, we consider the language-learning strategies most frequently associated with toddlers and preschoolers.

TO D D L E R L A N G U AG E - L E A R N I N G S T R AT E G I E S

To assume that toddlers, children ages 12 to 24 months, merely speak what they hear is to oversimplify the acquisition of language. A child must use certain learning methods to sort out relevant and irrelevant information in adult and sibling conversations. A child must decide which utterances are good examples of the language for accomplishing his or her communica-tion goals and must hypothesize about their underlying meanings and structures.

Receptive Strategies: When Is a Word a Word?

As toddlers mature, they become increasingly adept at acquiring new words under conditions that are not always ideal (Baldwin, 1993). Although 14- to 15-month-olds experience diffi-culty establishing stable symbol-referent associations even with caregiver assistance, 18- to 19-month-olds are able to establish these links even when the caregiver names entities to which the toddler is not attending.

Before children can recognize words, they must gain a sense of how sounds go together to form syllables of the native language (Jusczyk, 1999). Infants may use lexical, syntactic, phonological, and stress-pattern cues in combination to break the speech stream they hear and aid interpretation. These cues are probably used flexibly depending on what’s available in any given situation (Sanders & Neville, 2000). For example, English words can begin with a consonant blend, such as bl or str; Korean words cannot. Armed with these phonological structures gained by listening to speech, the child can more easily locate word boundaries.

As a result, the seemingly endless speech flow becomes a series of distinct but, for now, meaningless words. For example, 6- to 10-month-old children reared in English-speaking homes begin to develop a bias in favor of words with the English pattern of emphasis on the first syllable, such as mommy, daddy, doggie, and baby. By 11 months, infants are sensitive to word boundaries and phonological characteristics of their native language (Myers et al., 1996;

Shafer, Shucard, Shucard, & Gerken, 1998).

Although adults modify their speech to highlight word and sentence boundaries and to hold a child’s attention, and although words usually pertain to semantic and pragmatic concepts previously established, these explanations alone are insufficient for describing how toddlers learn words. What do children bring to the task? What assumptions do children make about language they encounter? Although linguists don’t really know, they can infer from the language behavior of toddlers that certain lexical principles or assumptions are being used.

Three assumptions of toddlers seem fundamental:

■ People use words to refer to entities.

■ Words are extendable.

■ A given word refers to the whole entity, not its parts. (Golinkoff, Mervis, &

Hirsh-Pasek, 1994)

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The first or reference principle assumes that people refer. Words do not just “go with” but actually “stand for” entities to which they refer. Therefore, a toddler must be able to determine the speaker’s intention to refer, the linguistic patterns used, and the entities to which they refer.

A subprinciple, the mutual exclusivity assumption, guides initial word learning by presuppos-ing that each referent has a unique symbol. In other words, a referent cannot be both a cup and a spoon. Eventually, as a child gains multiple referents for some words, this assumption will be overridden (Markman, 1992; Merriman & Bowman, 1989).

As you will recall from Chapter 1, words are symbols that represent concepts, not specific referents. Using the second or extendability principle, an infant assumes that there is some similarity, such as shared perceptual attributes, that enables use of one symbol for more than one referent. Thus, cup can refer to the child’s cup and to those that the child perceives to be similar, such as other child cups.

There is still some ambiguity, however, because the word doggie could refer to the dog’s fur, color, bark, four legs, or any number of similarities. The third or whole-object principle assumes that a label refers to a whole entity rather than to a part or attribute. In fact, object parts are rare in toddler lexicons (Mervis, 1990). Mothers aid this assumption of their children by providing basic-level terms (table) before more restricted terms (leg, top, drawer). Basic-level terms are often accompanied by pointing, while more restricted terms often require additional explanation or information. Thus, parental teaching strategies seem to match children’s learning preferences.

Three additional assumptions may be needed for the toddler to form hypothetical definitions quickly and to use syntactic information. These are

■ Categorical assumption.

■ Novel name-nameless assumption.

■ Conventionality assumption (Golinkoff et al., 1994; Markman, 1992).

The categorical assumption is used by children as young as 18 months to extend a label to re-lated entities. Classification is based not just on perceptual attributes, but on function, world knowledge, and communication characteristics, such as shortness of length and commonality.

Unlike the extendability principle, which would apply cup to a limited sample, the categorical assumption goes beyond basic-level referents of the same kind to categories of entities. In this case, cup may be extended to all objects that hold liquid.

The novel name-nameless assumption enables a child to link a symbol and referent after only a few exposures. In short, a child assumes that novel symbols are linked to previously unnamed referents. Use of this assumption seems to correspond to the vocabulary spurt experienced by many children at around 18 months (Mervis & Bertrand, 1993). Caregivers aid the child by naming and pointing to, holding, or manipulating novel objects to further specify the referent (Masur, 1997). As children mature, they rely less on these gestural assists and more on the caregivers’ language (Namy & Waxman, 1998).

Finally, the conventionality assumption leads a child to expect meanings to be expressed by others in consistent conventional forms. In other words, caregivers don’t change the word’s meaning with each use. A car is consistently called by that name. Conversely, because a child wishes to be understood, he or she is motivated to produce the forms used by the language community.

We are not certain that children actually use these principles or make these assump-tions. Toddlers employ these or similar principles, however, in order to make sense of the speech stream directed at them. It cannot be overemphasized that this learning process is an active one (Tomasello, Strosberg, & Akhtar, 1996). Children actively attempt to understand adult language and to make word-referent associations.

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Expressive Strategies

Young children use at least four expressive strategies to gain linguistic knowledge. These are evocative utterances, hypothesis testing, interrogative utterances, and selective imitation (McLean & Snyder-McLean, 1978). Evocative utterances are statements a child makes naming entities. After a child names, an adult usually gives evaluative feedback that confirms or negates the child’s selection of exemplars. As a result, the child either maintains or modifies his or her meaning. As you might expect, there is a positive relationship between the amount of verbal input from adults at 20 months and vocabulary size and average utterance length of the child at 24 months. Children are more verbal in homes in which parents are more verbal.

Hypothesis-testing and interrogative utterances are more direct methods of acquiring linguistic knowledge. When seeking confirmation of a word meaning, the child may say a word or word combination with rising intonation, such as “doggie앖” or “baby eat앖.” A responding adult either confirms or denies the child’s hypothesis. When unaware of an entity label, a child uses an interrogative utterance, such as “What?” “That?” or “Wassat?” These requests for infor-mation are even found in the pointing and vocalizing behaviors of infants prior to first words.

At 24 months there is a positive correlation between the number of interrogative utterances used by children and their vocabulary size.

The last strategy, imitation, is selective. Children do not imitate indiscriminately. They are actively selecting. Table 6.2 contains examples of selective imitation. Note that the ends of utterances seem to have particular perceptual importance for children.

Role of Selective Imitation Selective imitation is used in the acquisition of words, morphology, and syntactic-semantic structures (Perez-Pereira, 1994; Speidel & Herreshoff, 1989). In general, imitation is defined as a whole or partial repetition of an utterance of another speaker within no more than three successive child utterances. Approximately 20% of what toddlers say is an imitation of other speakers, although there are widespread differences across children, reflecting use or situational variations. For example, the amount of child imitation seems to reflect the amount of maternal imitation of her child.

Usually, imitations are slightly more mature than the production capacities of a child, indicating selective imitation’s use as a learning strategy. The role of imitation as a strategy is

TA B L E

6.2

ADULT: Daddy home.

CHILD: Daddy home.

ADULT: The doggie is sick.

CHILD: Doggie sick.

ADULT: You want the baby?

CHILD: No.

ADULT: Okay, mommy want baby.

CHILD: Want baby.

ADULT: Want Mommy to throw ball?

CHILD: No.

ADULT: What then?

CHILD: Throw ball.

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very complex. For example, imitation of others is important for vocabulary growth, while self-imitation seems to be important for the transition from single-word to multiword language production (Veneziano, Sinclair, & Berthoud, 1990).

The use of selective imitation as a learning strategy may also vary with individual children, although the overall amount decreases with age, especially after age 2. It appears that imitation’s usefulness as a language-learning strategy decreases as language becomes more complex.

At the single-word level, selective imitation seems particularly important for vocabulary growth, although conceptual development is certainly central as well. Although the presence of the referent increases the likelihood of imitation, a child’s ability to repeat an utterance depends on his or her understanding of its meaning.

Many imitations and much early vocabulary growth take place within the context of daily routines, which may contain predictable or repetitious language. Imitations may appear later in an altered form. For example, when a child goes to the door, his mother may say,

“Do you want to go out?” When next the child goes to the door, he may say, “Out.” The word is the same, but the intent has changed.

It has been suggested that imitation may also serve a conversational role, enabling a child to relate his or her utterances to those of more mature language users. In the following exchange, note how the child uses imitation to tie utterances to those of the adult:

PARENT: See Johnny ride his bike?

CHILD: Ride bike. Bike fall.

PARENT: No. He won’t fall.

CHILD: No fall. No go boom.

The form of the imitation may be determined by the child’s intent.

Note in the example how the child proceeds from repetitious utterances (Ride bike) to semantically diverse ones (No go boom). In the revisions, the child alters the preceding utterance (No. He won’t fall.) in order to maintain both the conversational and semantic relations and to sustain the topic. Children use two strategies of revision: focus operations and substitution operations. Focus operations, which predominate until about age 3, require only minimal linguistic skills. The child focuses on one or more words and repeats them. For example, when the caregiver says, “Baby’s going to sleep in her bed,” the child might say, “Sleep bed.”

In a substitution operation, the child repeats only a portion of the utterance but replaces words. For example, in response to “Baby’s going to sleep in her bed,” the child might say,

“Sleep blanket.” The topic is maintained, but the structure is changed. This behavior increases with age and resembles the conversational replies found in the more mature language use seen below:

ADULT₁: I’m going to put the baby down for a nap.

ADULT₂(Reply): Better cover her; it’s chilly.

The high degree of creativity found in preschool language may, in fact, reflect this sub-stitution process. A high percentage of preschool children’s novel utterances differ only slightly from utterances produced previously. For example, a child says, “Where’s Anna’s plate?” Previously, she had said “Where’s Anna’s W ?” and “Where’s mommy’s plate?” (Lieven, Behrens, Speares, & Tomasello, 2003, p. 340).

It is assumed that a language-learning child must store enough adult examples to allow him or her to abstract the linguistic relationship involved and to form a hypothesis. As children become more proficient with a structure in spontaneous speech, their imitation of it decreases.

Child Learning Strategies 157

Although the exact role of imitation in language acquisition is unclear, it appears that children most frequently selectively imitate items that they are in the process of learning or that have recently appeared. As such, imitation may serve young children as a modeling and stabilizing process for new structures. Imitation would thus reflect a child’s developmental level and the teaching strategies of the adults around him or her.

Role of Formulas A verbal routine or unanalyzed chunk of language often used in everyday conversation is called a formula. As memorized units, formulas function often as an entire utterance. For example, I knew a young child who continually ended all interactions with

“See ya, bye!” None of the words are used separately in other expressions. Children’s use of formulas is reported in several languages (Hickey, 1993; Perez-Pereira, 1994; Plunkett, 1993).

Although they are a form of deferred imitation, formulas have a purpose well beyond a repetitive one.

Use of formulas may represent a whole-to-parts learning strategy for some children (Hickey, 1993; Pine, 1990; Pine & Lieven, 1990). Newly acquired forms learned as formulas gradually progress from unit learning to parts learning as a child analyzes the formula into its individual symbols (Elbers, 1990). Segmentation, or the analysis of formulas into their parts, coincides with the vocabulary spurt noted in children at approximately 20 months (Plunkett, 1993).

Unfortunately, some children—discussed in more detail in Chapter 7—use formulas with little or no analysis of the individual parts. Unlike segmentation, this is a nonproductive language-learning strategy. Thus, while formulas aid initial vocabulary growth, their nonseg-mentation may constrain development.

Summary Selective imitations and formulas function much as routines, providing a known

“scaffolding” for a child and reducing the language-processing load. Both aid linguistic analysis and are used meaningfully in conversation. Other strategies, such as the use of evocative, interrogative, and hypothesis-testing utterances, enable a child to further participate in conversation and to explore and test new words and structures.

P R E S C H O O L L A N G U AG E - L E A R N I N G S T R AT E G I E S

Obviously, the usefulness of selective imitation will be limited as a child begins to acquire struc-tures of more than a few words. This inefficiency of imitation accounts for the rapid decline of its use at between 24 and 30 months of age, suggesting the use of other learning strategies.

In general, children use what they know about language to help them decipher what they don’t know. For example, they may use semantics to decode syntax or syntax and context to figure out word meanings. This process is called bootstrapping. “To pull yourself up by your bootstraps” is an old American English idiom meaning to use the resources at hand to better yourself. This is what a child does when he or she uses knowledge in one area to enhance performance in another.

Using semantic bootstrapping, young language-learning children analyze syntax based on semantic structures. Persons and things become nouns, actions morph into verbs, attributes to adjectives, and spatial relations and directions form adverbs and prepositions.

In similar fashion, syntactic structures can be used to deduce word meanings (Gleitman, 1993). You may use this practice when you read an unknown word in text. This process is called syntactic bootstrapping. Relationships between words can aid in identifica-tion of parts of speech and their use. In practice, semantic and syntactic bootstrapping are complementary processes.

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Certain distinctions are learned before others. For example, one-time actions, such as fall and break, are likely to appear first in past tense, while ongoing durative actions, such as eat and play, appear in the present tense. Regardless of the language, changes in question form gener-ally occur in yes/no questions prior to wh- questions. Within wh- questions, those that ask what and where appear first, while why and when questions appear later. This is true in languages as different as Korean, Tamil, and English and reflect both cognitive and linguistic factors.

Children in the initial stage of language development also talk about the same general types of things. Utterances consist of animate or action-causing subjects (mommy, baby, dog) called agents and inanimate or action-receiving objects (ball, juice, cookie) called objects. Only later do children use inanimate subjects (Ball fall) and animate objects (Kiss baby). Syntactic rules are learned gradually. Initially, the rule may be unanalyzed and used in situation-specific instances. Use will generally proceed sporadically until a child masters the rule.

We can assume that children begin by learning the basic sentence type, which in English is subject-verb-object. Although adults may use this sentence type only 40 to 60% of the time, children probably assume that this order represents the basic order. Additional intonational and situational cues may help differentiate those utterances that vary from the basic sentence type.

Most likely, young children determine the syntactic rules by using cues provided by the meaning of an adult’s utterance. Mothers aid in this process by talking primarily about the present context.

Using knowledge of semantics, a preschooler attempts to pay attention to how and where se-mantic distinctions are marked syntactically. This varies across languages. For example, consonants and the inside of words are important in modern Hebrew, stems and word endings are important in Hungarian, and word and phrase order and relationships are important in English.

In addition to learning words, meanings, and word order, a child learns the classes in which words belong, such as nouns and verbs. Language rules apply to word classes, not to individual words. Most likely a child hypothesizes that words are similar and thus belong together because of the way they are treated linguistically. For example, a child hears certain words in English receive -ed and -ing markers and begins to “chunk” these words together into what adults call verbs. As the child discriminates similarities, words treated in the same manner are organized and linked together. New members are added as they meet the same criteria. Although this explanation is somewhat simplified, it adequately describes an active process by the child that corresponds to our knowledge of information processing and hypothesis building.

Initially, children rely on a few rigid syntactic formulas. In English, children become dependent on the subject-verb-object (SVO) (Mommy is eating a cookie) sentence form. Later, they learn other forms and develop a flexible system that is adaptable to different discourse situations. This evolution from rigid to flexible systems has been reported in the develop-ment of languages as different as English, Chinese, French, modern Hebrew, Hungarian, and Turkish.

Children’s grammatical errors do not necessarily reflect a lack of either knowledge or

Children’s grammatical errors do not necessarily reflect a lack of either knowledge or