Читать книгу Lifespan Development - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 279

Eleven-month-old William was wide eyed as his father handed him a ball and said, “Ball!” “Ba!” said William. William now understands many words and is beginning to try to utter them. Throughout language development, babies’ receptive language (what they can understand) exceeds their productive language (what they can produce themselves; Tamis-Lemonda & Bornstein, 2015). That is, infants understand more words than they can use. Research suggests that infants may understand some commonly spoken words as early as 6 to 9 months of age, long before they are able to speak (Bergelson & Swingley, 2012; Dehaene-Lambertz & Spelke, 2015).

At about 1 year of age, the average infant speaks his or her first word. At first, infants use one-word expressions, called holophrases, to express complete thoughts. A first word might be a complete word or a syllable. Usually, the word has more than one meaning, depending on the context in which it is used. For example, “Da” might mean, “I want that,” “There’s Daddy!” or “What’s that?” Caregivers usually hear and understand first words before other adults do. The first words that infants use are those that they hear often or are meaningful for them, such as their own name, the word no, or the word for their caregiver. Infants reared in English-speaking homes tend to use nouns first, as they are most concrete and easily understood (Waxman et al., 2013). For example, the word dog refers to a concrete thing—an animal—and is easier to understand than a verb, such as goes. In contrast, infants reared in homes in which Mandarin Chinese, Korean, or Japanese is spoken tend to learn verbs very early in their development in response to the greater emphasis on verbs in their native languages (Waxman et al., 2013).

Regardless of what language a child speaks, early words tend to be used in the following ways (MacWhinney, MacWhinney, & Brian, 2015; Owens, 2016):

 Request or state the existence or location of an object or person by naming it (car, dog, outside).

 Request or describe the recurrence of an event or receipt of an object (again, more).

 Describe actions (eat, fall, ride).

 Ask questions (what? that?).

 Attribute a property to an object (hot, big).

 Mark social situations, events, and actions (no, bye).