CLASS PRESENTATION DRAFT:

SUBJECT: CLINICAL LINGUISTICS AND MULTILINGUAL

ISSUES IN COMMUNICATION
TOPIC: SEMANTIC ACQUISITION

PRESENTERS: SONAL JHA

LAKSHMI A
PREENA PARMAR
FACULTY: DR BRAJESH PRIYADARSHI

Contents of the presentation:

1. Introduction
2. Semantic building blocks
3. Influences on Semantic Development
4. Semantic Development in Infancy
5. Semantic Development in Toddlerhood
6. Semantic Development in Preschool age children
7. Semantic Development in School age children
8. Semantic Development in Adolescents
9. Process of Word Learning
[Link] seen in normal semantic acquisition
[Link] acquisition in Bilinguals
[Link] studies: Research article
[Link]
INTRODUCTION:
 The word semantics was coined by French linguist Michel Bréal
 Semantics- the study of meaning
 Semantic development refers to an individual’s learning and storage of the
meanings of words. In acquiring the semantic system of his language then,
the child must acquire knowledge both of dictionary meanings and of
syntactic and logical relationship to understand utterances and to produce
understandable utterances.
 Semantic acquisition is the process of learning to encode and decode
meaning. It is the course of acquisition of words, their meanings and the link
between them.
 This does not happen all at once. During the course of this process (semantic
development), children’s strategies for learning word meanings and relating
them to one another changes as their internal representation of language
constantly grows and becomes reorganized.
 When encountering a new word, the child must develop an internal
representation of the word that includes its phonological form (the specific
sounds in it and their order), its grammatical role (e.g., verb, pronoun, noun),
and its conceptual meaning.

Theoretical Perspectives On Semantic Development:

a) Learning theory
 Learning theory predicts that repeated exposure to a stimulus, paired
with a particular experience, will result in the child associating the
sound of the word with an object in the environment.
 For example- hearing the parent say the word kitty and seeing the
family cat appear will result in child associating the word kitty with
the family cat.
 Eventually, the infant will react to the word alone as if the cat were there.
 Learning theory may explain the earliest and simplest kinds of linking
between words and objects.
 According to Smith, 1999, children are especially sensitive to
novelty in their environment and predisposed to apply new
words to new objects.
 Exclusive reliance on associated learning, however would be slow,
effortful, and idiosyncratic, and result in many errors.
 Rather, early stages of children word learning are not slow and error
laden instead is rapid, predictable and remarkably accurate.
Developmental theories: Developmental theories consider semantic
development within the wider context of the child’s unfolding social, cognitive
and linguistic skills. Children learn meanings of words by drawing on skills in
multiple domains.
 Clark (1993) theorizes that by the time they start learning language all
children have developed a set of ontological categories.
 Ontological categories are concept about how the world is organized.
These ontological categories include objects, actions, events, relations,
states and properties.
 These are basic categories in all languages that speakers refer to
when they use language.
 For instance: the baby hears the mother say words such as Rufus, dog,
bone and look. An infant may initially assume that the word dog applies
only to the family dog. Eventually children must come to understand
that the single label can be applied to more than one specific case.
Without this insight, infants cannot understand the nature of reference,
or to communicate about objects, actions and properties (Clark,1993).
 Not only does the label dog refer to many different dogs, a particular
dog may be labelled in many ways. Moreover, when a child hears a
new word, the word could refer to an action such as barking, a
property or state as sleeping, or even a part of an object, such as the
dog ’stail.
According to Tomasello (2003), the children rely on their rudimentary
understanding of other people’s attentional and intentional states and how
those states relate to what is likely to be communicated to avoid mis
mappings

Processes in the acquisition of the meaningfulness of the speech signal

In the course of development of comprehension of meaningfulness of speech

signal, some gross behavioural changes in the responsiveness of the infant to
speech signal have been observed. Imitation has often been evoked as necessary
to comprehension and as an indication of the infant’s increasing comprehension
of the signal.

Process of imitation has three phases:

 First: A rudimentary vocal response to vocalization with no similarity to the

stimulus.
 Second: An abeyance of this rudimentary response during which the
situation in which vocalizations occur is observed rather than sounds
themselves. The behaviour which precedes the second phase is when infant
grossly responds to vocalizations with vocalisations.
 Third: Specific responses to particular patterns. Child now has the capacity to
produce a greater variety of vocal sounds and can recognize and manipulate
the relationships between the speech signal and the objects and situations in
the environment.

 Stabilisation of meaning occurs through response of the environment.

 The mother states and the child imitate. Example-Child stops his activity to
word “No”. Comprehension on the other hand appears to precede
production. The use of verbal symbol system, at the beginning stages of
relating meanings to symbols, can be arbitrary. The child produces different
strings when indicating the same object, and he produces words which have
no resemblance to adult utterances. Ex- Shoe-chu-tu.
 The infant’s so-called imitations are very poor matches of the model
phonological and syntactic patterns presented to him, and will continue to
be for some time. The child produces different strings when indicating the
same object, and he produces words which have no resemblance to adult
utterances.

SEMANTIC BUILDING BLOCKS

 Semantic development involves three major tasks for the language learner:
(a) acquiring a mental lexicon of about 60,000 words between infancy and
adulthood, (b) learning new words rapidly, and (c) organizing the mental
lexicon in an efficient semantic network.
 Structure of lexicon
 The term lexeme, or lexical item, refers to the underlying units involved,
"word" being then reserved for grammatical use. Lexemes are thus the
minimal units of vocabulary, and thus of semantics. The lexical items used at
the stage of development when one- word utterances are primarily being
belonging to several grammatical classes. However, not being functionally
used as members of these grammatical classes, but syntactically as members
and often in conjunction with a particular action.
 Example- When a child says “Car”, he is really saying it as “Look at the car”,
“Give me car”, “Is it Car” as defined by his actions and the prosodic features
of utterance.
Mental Lexicon
A person’s mental lexicon (or simply the lexicon) is the volume of words he or
she understands (receptive lexicon) and uses (expressive lexicon). Typically, the
receptive lexicon is larger because an individual usually understands many more
words than he or she actually uses.

Estimates of the size of a child’s lexicon show that its volume increases
remarkably quickly during the first several years of life—from only several words
at age 12 months, to 300 words at age 24 months, to 60,000 words by early
adulthood (Fenson, Dale, Reznick, Bates, & Thal, 1994).

When practitioners think about the size of a child’s lexicon, they consider not
only its volume, but also the individual lexical items it contains. a semantic
taxonomy differentiates words on the basis of their semantic roles (Ingram,
1989). One classic semantic taxonomy differentiates children’s lexical items into
five categories (Ingram, 1989):
1. Specific nominals refer to a specific object (e.g., Daddy, Fluffy)
2. General nominals refer to all members of a category (e.g., those, cats)
3. Action words describe specific actions (e.g., up), social-action games
(e.g., peekaboo), and action inhibitors (e.g., no)
4. Modifiers describe properties and qualities (e.g., big, mine)
 5. Personal–social words describe affective states and relationships (e.g.,
yes,
bye-bye)
Children’s early lexicons, comprising the first 50 or so words, typically contain at
least one word in each semantic category.
Of these general and specific nominals, most refer to tangible, concrete items,
such as shoe and cup; infants’ understanding of more abstract nominals develop
along a more protracted timeline (Bergelson & Swingley, 2013).

The lexical item the child learns is used in a manner which indicates that the full
set of semantic properties of the item is not understood. Example- Brush Mama
and Brush Papa are understood but not Brush hat. Hence a child learns certain
unique properties of lexical items which are dependent on situational and
sentence contexts.

New Words
A number of factors influence the rapidity with which a child develops an adult-
like understanding of a word. We consider three of them next:
Concept represented by the word:
-As children engage in learning a new word, some words are clearly easier to
learn than others because of the concepts the words express. For instance,
children acquiring English learn the words go and hit, which refer to concrete
actions, more easily than think and know, which represent abstract concepts
(Gleitman, Cassidy, Nappa, Papafragou, & Trueswell, 2005).
-A related concept is the notion of imageability, which concerns how readily an
individual can generate a mental image of a word (Golinkoff, Hirsh – Pasek,
McDonough, & Tardif, 2009). Apple and cup have very high imageability,
whereas tomorrow and believe have low imageability (ma et al., 2009).
-Comprehension of the verbal symbols comes through observation of the
use of the symbols in environmental and syntactic contexts and that the
modification of the production of these symbols comes about through
these means.

Example-Give me your shoes, put your shoes on, I have to take your shoes
off.

Linguistic generalization comes about through observation of a variety of ways a

lexical item can be used. Acquisition of the meaning of the symbol does not
seem to be a simple path from imitation to comprehension to production. In
order to comprehend the meaning of a verbal symbol a lot more is required than
the association between the stimulus object and the symbol. Example -A shoe
not only is a physical object having a certain shape, colour or texture but also has
functional properties and can be manipulated in certain ways. The child responds
to comments about the shoe before she produces certain utterances.

Infants continue to produce an utterance which the mother rejected and went
on to further modify a production which the mother accepted

INFLUENCES ON SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT

Several factors influence not only the rate and ease with which children build
their lexicon, but also their efficiency in retrieving words from the lexicon.

Gender
 In the first several years of language acquisition, girls usually have larger
vocabularies and learn words more easily than boys (Bornstein, Hahn, &
Haynes, 2004).
 These early differences in semantic development result from a
combination of biological, psychological, and social variables (Bornstein et
al., 2004).
Language Impairment
 Children who exhibit a developmental disorder of language (SLI) typically
have significantly smaller vocabularies than those of their peers without
SLI (Nash & Donaldson, 2005). Difficulties in learning new words and
poorly organized semantic networks contribute to these differences in
lexical size.
Language Exposure
 Numerous studies have revealed a significant relationship between the
number and types of words children hear in their environment and the
size of their vocabulary (Hoff, 2003; Hurtado, Marchman, & Fernald,
2008).
 Children reared in orphanages who experience relatively little language
input typically show depressed vocabularies (Glennen, 2002). The same
finding is true for children reared in low-SES households compared with
children living in higher-SES households (Rowe, 2009), presumably
because children in low-SES households are exposed to fewer words.
THE PROCESS OF WORD LEARNING

1. Wordsegmentation
 The first problem for the child is to identify how to find the word within
the stream of speech
 Babies identify words in the speech stream in part by recognising
recurring sound sequences (Saffran etal.,1996).
 Babies may first use statistical learning to isolate words in the speech
stream andthen use that knowledge to learn other cues to word
boundaries in theirlanguage.
 Studies suggest that infants attend to the rhythmic properties of
speech, learn the rhythm of their particular language and use that
rhythm to segment speech stream (Cutler,1994, 1996;Mehler,
Dupoux, Nazzi, & Dehaene-Lambertz,1996;Thiessen & Saffran,2003).
 Phonotactic cues also provide word boundarymarkers.
 Some of the special characteristic of child directed speech might also
helpchildren with speech segmentation (Ratner,1996).

2. Word referentmapping
 The children tend to figure out the meaning of the words that theyhear.
 It appears that children begin by making an initial fast mapping
between a new word they hear and a likely candidatemeaning.
 Carely (1978) demonstrated that children who have heard a new word
only oncehave already developed hypotheses about what that
wordmeans.
 Children as young as 13months are capable of learning new words
on the basis of only a few exposures(Woodward,
Markman,&Fitzsimmons,1994)

3. Lexical principles as guides to wordlearning

 The lexical principles guide the child by constraining the possible
interpretations of new words that children
mustconsider(Behrend,1990)
 The two proposed word learning constraints are the whole object
assumption andthe assumption of
mutualexclusivity(Markmann,1991,1994)
 Whole object assumption: it is the child’s assumption that words refer
to whole objects. According to this proposal, children assume that
 every new word theyhear refers to some whole object rather than to
part of an object or to property of the object.
 Mutual exclusivity assumption: It is the assumption that different
words referto different kinds ofthings.
 The mutual exclusivity assumption also provides a basis for overriding
the whole – object assumption, which children must do in order to
learn terms for parts and properties of objects.

4. Pragmatic principles as guides to wordlearning

 Clark (1993, 1995) proposed that word learning is supported
bychildren’s understanding of pragmaticprinciples.
 According to principle of conventionality, the meaning of a word is
determinedby convention; it has to be agreed upon and observed by
all members of a language community.
 According to principle of contrast, different words have
differentmeanings.
5. Social-pragmatic understandings as word learningguides
 Children may also find support for solving the mapping
problem intheir understandings of the conversational
process and the intentions of their conversationalpartners.
 More generally, it has been argued that children figure out the
meaning of thenew words they hear by figuring out the
communicative intentions of the
speaker([Link],2000;Diensendruck &
Markson,2001;Tomasello,2001)

6. General learning processes as the basis of wordlearning

 Linda Smith and her colleagues have proposed that general process
and learningcan help the child to learn newwords(Smith,1998)
 Samuelson and Smith (1998) argue that the item’s newness in the
physical context makes it salient to the child, who attaches the new
word to the physically mostsalient item.
7. Input as a source of support
 People tend to talk to young children about what is currently going
rather thanabout past or futureevents.
 This feature about child-directed speech makes the child’s task of
 mapping words to their referents easier than if the child were watching
speeches on the senate floor, for example.
 Also, adults also provide explicit instruction about word meanings.
Adults offer new labels and corrections of children’s imprecise
lexicalchoices.
 Adult also provides information about wordmeanings.
 The evidence that variation in mother’s child directed speech predicts
theirchildren’s vocabulary development can meaningfully support the
word learningprocess.
8. Syntax as a clue to wordmeaning
 Once the children have acquired enough grammar to identify
nouns, verbs and adjectives, children can use grammar as a clue
to themeaning.
 The proposal that knowledge of language structure is generally
useful forlearning new verbs is termed as syntactic bootstrapping
Hypothesis
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT IN INFANT AND TODDLER(BIRTH – 3YRS)
 Vocabulary development begins at around 12 months when children
produce words that label familiar entities, actions and objects in the
environment.
a) VOCABULARYDEVELOPMENT
  Children have an expressive vocabulary of 1or 2 words at 12months
of age, 4to 6 wordsat15months, 20words at 18months and 200 to
300 words at 24months.

Age No. Of acquired words

12 months 1 or 2
15 months 4 to 6
18months 20
24 months 200 to 300
6 years 10000 words

 Children learn about 5 new words daily between 1.5 to 6 years

ofage(Anglin,1993)
 Some children’s vocabulary shows a vocabulary spurt or naming
explosion when they acquire a 50word vocabulary during the second
year oflife.
 Children’s receptive vocabulary generally exceeds their expressive
vocabulary and they are able to understand at least 50 words when
their expressive vocabulary consistof 10 words.
 According to Nelson(1973) English speaking children’s first words
consistof
 Nouns such as doggie and ball(65%)
 Action words such as go and up(13%)
 Modifiers such as hot and mine(9%)
 Personal-social words such as bye-bye and no(8%)
 Function words such as what(4%)
 Overextension: Young children frequently use the perceptual
characteristics or functional characteristics of entities to extend the
meaning beyond that entity. For Eg, labeling all four animals
asdoggie.
 Under extension: children having a restricted or limited definition of
words. ForEg, children may deny that their mother’s high heels
areshoes.
 Children’s understanding of the meaning of words develops over time
asconceptual and vocabulary skilldevelops.
b) RELATIONALTERMS
 Semantic development includes the acquisition of relationalterms.
 Relationship concepts include (McCune-Nicolich,1981)
  Time (sequence) : first, next,last
 Objects (Presence orabsence)
 Location: in,on
 Space (movement) : back, up, down, open
 Relational terms, such as term more, all gone, and up appear at the
single wordstage (McCune-Nicholich,1980)

Learning relational terms is fundamental to language development (Gök-sun,

Hirsh- Pasek, &Golinkoff, 2009) because prepositions allow children to
describe relation between objects.
 The locational relationship terms such as in, on, under are achieved
by 24-36 months of age ([Link],1980).

c) SEMANTICROLES
 Another area of development is children’s production of semantic
roles( Bernstein& Levey,2009)
 These semantic roles include agent, action, object, location,
possession, rejection, disappearance, nonexistence anddenial.
 At 12 to 18 months, semantic roles are expressed in children’s one
wordproductions.
 At about 18 months, children begin to produce two word utterances.
When they acquire at least 20 words, they combine semantic roles to
create semanticrelation. For eg. Mommy go(agent+action)
 The production of semantic relations mark children’s productions of
newmeanings and expanded ways to expressmeaning.
SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT IN PRESCHOOL AGE:
a) VOCABULARYDEVELOPMENT
a. The main concepts acquired between 2 and 5
years of age consists of:
i. Spatial concepts (location): in, on, between, across and
along
ii. Temporal concepts (time): before, after, later
iii. Quantity concepts: more, less, empty, full
iv. Quality concepts: rough, smooth, hard, soft
v. Social- emotional concepts: happy, sad
b. Semantic development appears in children’s vocabulary
development. The preschool years show growth in children’s
vocabulary skills, with a connection between child’s vocabulary
development and parental input.
c. Vocabulary increases rapidly in this period.
d. According to Ownes, Metz, & Haas (2000).

Age No. of words acquired

3yrs 900-1000
4yrs 1500
5yrs Over 2000

e. In this period, novel or new words are learned quickly following

initial representations in both direct teaching and informal
contexts. This process of learning words in initial representations
is referred to as fast mapping.
f. During the late preschool period and into the early years,
children’s word definitions are concrete.
Language content in Preschool Age
Even before children enter formal schooling, they acquire skills that ease
their transition into the academic realm and the language that
 accompanies this transition. For example, pre-schoolers continue to
acquire new words at a lightning pace—about 860 words per year—
averaging about two new words per day during this period (Biemiller,
2005). However, the strategies pre-schoolers use for acquiring new
words and the kinds of words they learn are different from those in the
infancy and toddler periods.
Vocabulary Development
E. Dale (1965) described vocabulary knowledge development as a four-
stage process:
Stage 1 No knowledge of the word “I never saw it before.”
Stage 2 Emergent knowledge “I’ve heard of it but don’t know what it
means.
Stage 3 Contextual knowledge “I recognize it in context— it has
something to do with …”
Stage 4 Full knowledge “I know it.”
During the preschool period, children’s vocabularies include words at
each of these levels. Children may require multiple exposures to words
in varying contexts to attain what Carey (1978) called extended
mapping, or a full and complete understanding of the meaning of a
Knowledge of semantics and syntax
In the preschool years, children know many vocabulary words and have
a well-developed syntax, so when they learn new words, they rely on
their knowledge of semantics and syntax to incorporate (or assimilate)
the new words into their vocabulary.
Toddlers learning new words may overgeneralize as many as one-third of
word meanings on the basis of categorical, analogical, and relational
similarities. The perceptual features of objects weigh heavily in toddlers’
overgeneralizations (e.g., calling all round objects “balls”). In the preschool
years, children continue to overextend object names on the basis of
information they have about other objects, but they weigh the function of
an object more heavily than its perceptual appearance.
Another way preschoolers infer the meanings of new words is by recruiting
syntactic cues that signal the form class (e.g., noun, verb, adjective) of a
novel word to narrow the possibilities for the referent of the word. For
example, children who hear “this is a dax” interpret dax to be a count noun,
whereas children who hear “this is Dax'' interpret Dax to be a proper name.
 Preschool-age children can also recognize the difference between
sentences that refer to objects in a generic way (“Birds lay eggs”) and
sentences that refer to an object in a specific way (“this bird lays eggs”;
Gelman & Raman, 2007), and may use the syntactic cues in these two
different types of sentences to learn about the meanings of new words. For
example, imagine a preschooler, Jess, is reading a storybook about animals
with her mother. as they are reading, they encounter an animal jess has
never seen before and for which she doesn’t know
the name (a raccoon). If Jess's mother uses a sentence that refers to
raccoons in a generic way, by saying “raccoons like to get into garbage
cans,” jess will likely infer that getting into garbage cans is something many
raccoons do. If her mother were instead to use a sentence that refers to a
specific raccoon, by saying “this raccoon likes to get into garbage cans,” Jess
might instead infer that getting into garbage cans is a pastime unique to the
individual raccoon her mother is describing.

Shared storybook reading

In addition to learning words through single and multiple incidental
exposures, pre-schoolers acquire new words as they participate in
shared storybook interactions with other people. The language
contained within storybook readings is exceptionally rich. In fact,
maternal language in storybook-reading activities contains a more
diverse array of syntax and vocabulary, and typically has a higher level of
abstraction than that in other language contexts, including play (Sorsby
& Martlew, 1991).

RELATIONALTERMS
g. During preschool years, children acquire relational terms
that apply to temporal (time), spatial (location),
physical(place) and kinship relations.
h. Temporal relations: the temporal relations include terms
before, after, when, since and while.
i. Children follow the order of mention during the preschool
stages of language development and acquire an
understanding of the terms before and after at about5 years
 of age (Owens, 2012).
j. Locational, Physical, and Kinship terms

Age (years) Locational Physical relationship Kinship terms

relationship
3-4 Under Big/little, Hard/soft, Mother/father
Heavy/light
4-4.5 Next to, Tall/short, Sister/brother,
behind, long/short Grandfather/grandmo
in back of, in
front of ther
School age Right/left Deep/shallow, Uncle/aunt, cousin,
thick/thin, nephew/niece
wide/narrow

NARRATIVEDEVELOPMENT

k. Narrative is a form of discourse that differs from conversation

because narratives do not require a listener’s response.
Narrative consists of an extended monologue that incorporates
the use of intonation, gesture and prosody along with
description of an event (Ukraninetz McFadden,1991).
l. Narratives include sharing and recounting of personal events
and experiences, self-generated stories, telling and retelling
familiar tales, and retelling of stories from movies, books and
television shows.
m. Narrative production by preschool children (Bernstein,2011)

Age (years) Narrative types Example

3 Primitive narrative Central topic with no
temporal order
4 Unfocused chains Sequential
information with no
causal relations
5 Simple causal chains Initiating event,
attempt and
consequence (missing
setting, internal
 response and internal
plan)

After 5 True narratives Setting, initiating

event, internal
response, internal
plan, attempts,
consequence,
resolution/reaction,
and ending.

SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT IN SCHOOL AGE:

Four areas of notable content development for school-age students are:
1. Lexical development
2. Understanding of multiple meanings
3. Understanding of lexical and sentential ambiguity
4. Development of literate language.

Lexical Development
 School-age students have command over about 60,000 words upon
graduation from high school (Pinker, 1994).
 School-age children learn new words in at least three ways: through
direct instruction, contextual abstraction, and morphological analysis
(Nippold, 1998)
1. Direct Instruction: Learning the meaning of a word directly from a
more knowledgeable source (e.g., Dictionary, books, a person who
is more knowledgeable).
2. Contextual Abstraction: Using contextual cues to determine
meaning of new words. When encountering new words in text, we
make either pragmatic inferences or logical inferences about the
meanings of the words (Westby, 1998).
 Pragmatic inferences: Using individual’s personal world
knowledge or background knowledge to the text.
  Logical inferences: Use only the information the text
provides and are more difficult to make than pragmatic
inferences.
Westby explained that people make pragmatic inferences more
often when they are reading narrative texts (such as storybooks),
and logical inferences when they are reading expository texts
(such as textbooks).
3. Morphological Analysis: Involves analysing the lexical, inflectional,
and derivational morphemes of unfamiliar words. e.g., A child who
encounters the word homophone in a language arts textbook can
use knowledge of the morpheme’s homo- (meaning “same”) and -
phone (meaning “sound”) to make an educated guess about the
meaning of the word.
 Although younger children (ages 6–10 years) become proficient at using
morphemes to infer the meanings of new words, their older
counterparts (ages 9–13 years) are proficient at using both
morphological information and context clues to arrive at the meanings
of unfamiliar words.
 Examples of morphemes with clear lexical meaning that older children
(age 9 years and older) might use to decipher the meanings of unfamiliar
words include the common prefixes un-, re-, dis-, en-, em-, non-, over-,
mis-, sub-, fore-, de-, trans-, super-, semi-, anti-, mid-, and under-, as
well as the “not” prefixes (in-, im-, ir-, il-; White, Sowell, & Yanagihara,
1989).

Understanding of multiple meanings

 As the lexicons of school-age children grow and they encounter more
and more words, they realize many words have multiple meanings. As
students develop, they become able to provide multiple definitions for
words with several similar meanings, but they have particular difficulty
understanding the secondary meanings of words that bear little or no
relation to the primary meaning. Being able to supply multiple meanings
for words requires not only lexical knowledge but also metalinguistic
knowledge, both of which are necessary to achieve full competence at
the literate end of the oral–literate language continuum.
Understanding of Lexical and Sentential Ambiguity
 Lexical ambiguity occurs for words and phrases with multiple meanings,
such as “That was a real bear”, in which bear has several meanings.
Lexical ambiguity at the level of the individual word may take one of
three forms:
1. Homophones: Homophones are words that sound alike but have
different meanings. Homophones may be spelled alike (brown
bear vs. bear weight) or may be spelled differently (brown bear vs.
Cold Beer), in which case they are called heterotrophs.
2. Homographs: Homographs are words that are spelled the same
way but have
different meanings. Homographs may sound alike (row a boat vs.
row of homes) or may sound different from each other (record
player vs. record a movie), in which case they are called
heteronyms or heterophones.
3. Homonyms: Homonyms are words that are alike in spelling and
pronunciation
but differ in meaning (brown bear vs. bear weight). they are both
homophones
and homographs.
Students with weak oral language skills are often not adept at noticing
when lexical ambiguities are present and are less likely than other
students to seek clarification of the ambiguity, both of which can result
in a communication breakdown (Paul, 1995).
 Sentential ambiguity involves ambiguity within different components of
sentences. It includes not only lexical ambiguity but also Phonological
ambiguity, surface-structure ambiguity, and deep-structure ambiguity.
1. Phonological ambiguity: Occurs with a sound sequence that
carries more than one interpretation; it often occurs when a
listener confuses the boundaries between words (I can’t wait for
the weekend vs. I can’t wait for the weak end).
2. Surface-structure ambiguity: Results when words within a
sentence can be grouped in two different ways, with each
grouping conveying a different interpretation (I fed her bird seed
vs. I fed her bird seed), or as in the joke, “can you tell me how long
cows should be milked? they should be milked the same as short
ones, of course” (Chapman & Foot, 1996, p. 13).
 3. Deep-structure ambiguity: A noun serves as the subject of a
sentence in one interpretation and as an object in another (e.g.,
The duck is ready to eat can mean “the duck is hungry” or “the
duck is ready to be eaten”; Nippold, 1998, p. 140).

Development of Literate Language

 Literate language: Language that is highly decontextualized.
 The literate language style characterizes language used to “monitor and
reflect on experience, and reason about, plan, and predict experiences”
(Westby, 1985, p. 181). To understand literate language, a child must be
able to use language without the aid of context cues to support
meaning; he or she must rely on language itself to make meaning.
 Children’s discourse development moves along a continuum reflecting
oral language at one end and literate language at the other (Westby,
1991).
 At the lower level of the discourse continuum is oral language, or the
linguistic aspects of communicative competence necessary for
communicating basic desires and needs (phonology, syntax,
morphology, and semantics). Westby described children at this end of
the continuum as “learning to talk”
 Children learning to talk can achieve some basic language functions,
including requesting and greeting. They can also produce simple
syntactic structures. For example, English speakers can form yes-or-no
questions by inserting do before the subject of the sentence (“You like
ice cream” becomes “Do you like ice cream?”) and can mark the past
tense by adding -ed or by retrieving the appropriate irregular past tense
verb.
 Only when children have mastered oral language can they begin to “talk
to learn” or to use language to reflect on past experiences and reason
about, predict, and plan for future experiences using decontextualized
language (Westby, 1991).
 Children who talk to learn are at the literate language end of the
discourse continuum. At this end, children use language to
communicate, but also to engage in higher-order cognitive functions,
such as reflecting, reasoning, planning, and hypothesizing.
 Four specific features of literate language that children learn to use are
as follows (Curenton & Justice, 2004):
1. Elaborated noun phrases: An elaborated noun phrase is a group of
words consisting of a noun and one or more modifiers providing
additional information about the noun, including articles (a, an,
the), possessives (my, his, their), demonstratives (this, that,
those), quantifiers (every, each, some), wh- words (what, which,
whichever), and adjectives (tall, long, ugly).
 By age 5, children can produce simple designating noun
phrases. Simple designating noun phrases include a
determiner followed by a noun (e.g., the boy, some candy).
 By age 8, children can produce simple descriptive noun
phrases, which consist of a determiner and a descriptive
element followed by a noun (e.g., the garage door, a small
toy).
 By 11 years of age, children can produce elaborated noun
phrases with post modification, which consist of a
determiner and a noun followed by a prepositional phrase
or a clause (e.g., a boy named Dillon, a girl with red hair;
Eisenberg et al., 2008).
2. Adverbs: An adverb is a syntactic form that modifies verbs and
enhances the explicitness of action and event descriptions.
Adverbs provide additional information about time (suddenly,
again, now), manner (somehow, well, slowly), degree (almost,
barely, much), place (here, outside, above), reason (therefore,
since, so), and affirmation or negation (definitely, really, never).
3. Conjunctions: Conjunctions are words that organize information
and clarify relationships among elements. Coordinating
conjunctions (include and, for, or, yet, but, nor, and so).
Subordinating conjunctions are more numerous and (include
after, although, as, because, and therefore), as well as others.
4. Mental and linguistic verbs: Mental and linguistic verbs refer to
various acts of thinking and speaking, respectively. Mental verbs
include think, know, believe, imagine, feel, consider, suppose,
decide, forget, and remember. Linguistic verbs include say, tell,
speak, shout, answer, call, reply, and yell.
SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT IN SCHOOL YEARS AND BEYOND:
Vocabulary Development:
Researchers have estimated that by high school, although the rate of growth
slows to a steadier pace, students are eventually capable of understanding
around 80,000 words.
As students continue to learn new words, they also recognize additional
features associated with each word and they discover additional meaning for
each word.
Vertical and Horizontal Development:
The growth of vocabulary has been conceptualized as occurring in 2 directions:
Horizontal and Vertical (McNeill, 1970).
Horizontal development: It is characterized as the process of associating
additional features with a word. The additional features fill out the meaning of
the word- expending its horizons if you will- to eventually approximate it’s
more adult like meaning.
E.g.: Mama may have only 1 referent with specific features. Eventually, the
meaning is broadened horizontally to include other children’s mothers, dogs
that have puppies, etc.
Vertical development: The separate multiple meaning of words is learned. The
earliest meaning of the word block was probably based on toy item, however
eventually a child is told that his blocks are blocking the doorway and to never
cross the street or leave the block.
During the school age years, however, not only with other meanings be added
(e.g.: dad may block out a section of yard to become a garden, he may select a
block of text to edit on his computer) but older students will begin to recognize
the conceptual relationship among them.
Word definitions:
By the time students have progressed through 6th grade, they can provide a
relatively formal, conventional definition. Being conventionalized these might
follow a formula of sorts, typically starting with the items category (e.g.: A
[noun] is a [category]…) and matching this with its functions and features to
distinguish it from other items. (…that [functions] and has a [feature] and
[feature]). Translated this might go something like a car is a vehicle that carries
people and has a motor and a trunk.
Changing Organization of Vocabulary:
One of the telling behaviours in students maturing semantic domains is their
ability to relate words to each other with increasing flexibility.
Words become associated through context that overlap in a physical or
conceptual way. When these connections are perceived and expressed in
students’ language it’s signals that they are able to understand and respond to
their world at an abstract level.
Semantic Networks:
It is the web of related words and concepts interconnecting individual words in
a variety of ways (Peas & Berko Gleason, 1985).
Semantic networks appear to evolve later as a student becomes increasingly
aware of relatedness among certain words.
These relationships maybe thematically based as in being aware of all the
words that related to concept of a fire truck- firefighter, axes, hoses, sirens and
so forth. In turn, association may become organized according to conceptual
categories- events, objects, people. Ultimately other associations that are
superordinate- sub ordinate in nature may evolve- firefighter represents a
carrier, red is a colour, axes and hoses are tools, sirens signal an emergency,
and so on.
These interconnections may also contribute to 2 other related abilities that
illustrate the vocabulary organization during the school years divergent
semantic production and convergent semantic production (Guilford &
Hoepfner, 1971). As students’ vocabularies grow the pattern of association
among words become increasingly familiar. This enhances ability to produce
related words or recognize a specific word related to other words.
Divergent Semantic Production:
It is demonstrated when a word prompt expression of a variety of related
words, information and concepts. As a result, student becomes capable of
expressing ideas with greater flexibility by using a variety of related words. For
e.g.: In the previous example, the network of word associated with fire truck
provides a variety of relevant information and topics to use in discussing such
emergencies.
Convergent Semantic Production:
It is evidenced when the production of specific word is prompted by other
words that semantically point to it. That is, students are capable of inferring a
meaning that has been expressed indirectly through associated words and
concepts. In the above e.g., having overheard only scattered references to
siren, smoke, hoses and so forth students applying convergent semantic
abilities, would be able to guess that the conversation had something to do
with fire emergency. The ability to recognize semantic clues that lead to such
inferences is a skill that is fundamental to verbal reasoning ability so critical to
academic success.

TIMELINE OF SEMANTIC ACQUISTION:

ERRORS SEEN IN NORMAL SEMANTIC ACQUISITION:

The following are various errors seen in kids while they learn words and build
up their vocabulary.
1. Over extension – occurs when a categorical term is used in language to
represent more categories than it actually does. E.g. – all animals
referred to as doggie

2. Under extension - a child doesn't use a word for enough particular

cases. E.g.- only his pet is dog others are not.

3. Over regularization –A word that is supposed to change irregularly is

changed regularly by the child. Usually seen with tense forms and verbs
the error is usually seen after the child has acquired the language skills.
 E.g.- the plural of go is ideally went, but the child says goed. And another
is saying teeths instead of tooth.

What are probable explanations for these errors?

1. Semantic Feature hypothesis (Clarke 1973)

The extension of words to novel objects are primarily perceptual in
nature That is if 2 objects which may be of same size or shape may be
confused with each other and errors may occur. E.g., ball – Moon.
(shape similarity)

2. Functional core Hypothesis (Neilson 1974)

Neilson say that these extension errors are not due to perceptual
similarities but due to functional similarities between the 2 objects in
hand. She also adds children initially won’t be able to identify the
perceptual similarities like four legged or round in shape. Initially
things are understood as a whole rather than based on individual
perceptual features. Thus, in this model, the meaning of a new word
is initially represented by a set of stable functional components and it
is assumed that the child will apply new word to referents which have
common functional properties.
For e.g. – Term ball may be used for anything that can be bounced or
thrown around.

SEMANTIC ACQUISITION IN BILINGUALS

It’s a known fact that in real life most of us actually multilingual in nature.
(almost 2/3 of words population). One prominent question is whether bilingual
children are slower in developing there Two lexicons as compared to S
monolingual in developing one lexical repertoire but now research has shown
young bilingual children's vocabulary develop at the same rate as monolingual
when both their languages are taken into account (Pearson 2002) However the
vocabulary of A monolingual child will be more than bilingual child for a given
language. it is important to highlight that many bilingual children fall within the
normal range of variation for monolingual children. in sum bilingual child ten 2
to develop their vocabulary in each language a little slower than children
learning only one language yet their development it is typically within normal
range of variation at least for their stronger language
Certainly, if a bilingual child is assessed only in one language, then the entire
other set of words Known by the child remains Invincible
This is why researches argue to assess a bilingual child in in both the languages
over time bilingual speakers can develop sizeable and dip vocabularies in two
languages provided optimal environmental conditions are available however if
optimal conditions are not available a child who speaks different languages at
home and school main face considerable academic challenge. To better
support the vocabulary development in bilingual children we need to
understand what factors contribute to word learning in both languages
development in in each language depends on the amount of native input adult
model etc research indicates that Asin case with monolingual children rich
language environment which include narrative exchanges book reading
extended conversations following child's lead are all factors to language
development in a bilingual child therefore parents of a bilingual child should be
encouraged to speak with their child in their stronger language typically their
first language clearly more workers need to identify and provide programs that
will optimise the language development of emerging bilingual children.

RECENT STUDIES:
RESEARCH ARTICLE-
Tittle- The Effect of Difference in Word Order on Semantic Processing in
Hindi−English Bilinguals
Citation- Geet Govind Anand1, Kalpana K Barhwal2, Manish Goyal2 and
Bodepudi Narasimha Rao, Annals of Neurosciences 30(3) 169–176, 2023
Abstract Background: The typology of word order in Hindi (Subject-Object-
Verb, SOV) differs from that of English (Subject-VerbObject, SVO). Bilinguals
whose two languages have conflicting word order provide a unique
opportunity to understand how word order affects language processing. Earlier
behavioural and event-related brain potential (ERP) studies with Spanish-
Basque bilinguals showed longer reading times and more errors in the
comprehension of OSV sentences than SOV sentences in Basque language,
indicating that non-canonical word orders (OSV) were difficult to process than
canonical word order (SOV).
Purpose: This study was designed to explore how the difference in word order
in Hindi and English languages affects N400 parameters in proficient
Hindi−English bilinguals, using semantic congruity paradigm.
Methods: Twenty-five proficient Hindi−English bilingual subjects were asked to
silently read the congruent and incongruent sentences presented in one word
at a time in both the languages. ERPs were recorded from midline frontal,
central and parietal sites.
Results: The mean amplitude of the N400 effect at the parietal sites in
Hindi−English proficient bilinguals was larger for English than for Hindi but
there was no significant difference in the N400 latencies.
Conclusion: Hindi−English bilingual subjects processed SOV and SVO sentences
with equal ease as evidenced by the N400 latencies. Higher amplitude of the
N400 effect with English sentences indicate that placing ‘Object’ as the final
word makes sentences more predictable than verb as the final word.
Understanding the word order difference might help to unravel the
neurophysiological mechanisms of language comprehension and may offer
some insights in terms of functional advantage of a particular word order in
bilinguals

REFERNCES –
- Language Development from Theory to Practice (Third Edition), Turnbull & Justice
- The Acquisition and Development of Language (RE), Paula Menyuka
- Dressler Emergence and early development of lexicon and morphology; Dorit Ravid,
Emmanuel Keuleers and Wolfgang U.
- Introduction to language development ,Scott McLaughlin