Question

• Briefly describe a few characteristics of children’s first words.
• Identify 3 primitive speech acts and provide a specific example of one of them.
• How do you think a toddler’s lack of presuppositional skills might detract from the quality of his/her conversations?
• Briefly explain why nouns are typically more common in a child’s first 50 words.
• What do the results of the article by Ganger et al. suggest about the presence of the vocabulary spurt across children?

Answer 1

characteristics of child's first words :

According to psychologists language development is a critical part of child’s overall development.It supports child’s ability to communicate, and express and understand feelings. It also supports thinking and problem-solving, and developing and maintaining relationships. Learning to understand, use and enjoy language is the critical first step in literacy, and the basis for learning to read and write. Initially the child starts to development words around 6- 12 months, after 9 months the baby starts to coo and laugh. S/he play with sounds and begin to communicate with gestures. Second comes babbling followed be jargons. Here, they start saying consonant sounds and few words would typically be “mama” and “dada.