THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FUNCTIONAL ORIENTATION AND EARLY LEXICAL DEVELOPMENT (LANGUAGE, VOCABULARY).
Item
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Title
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THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FUNCTIONAL ORIENTATION AND EARLY LEXICAL DEVELOPMENT (LANGUAGE, VOCABULARY).
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Identifier
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AAI8501153
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identifier
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8501153
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Creator
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LONGTIN, SUSAN.
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Contributor
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Peg Lahey
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Date
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1984
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Developmental
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Abstract
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The primary purpose of this investigation was to examine the relationship of communicative functions to the types of early words children acquire in the one word period of language development. Eight children and their mothers participated in this study. The mothers maintained diaries of their children's lexical development which was supplemented by experimenter observations. The children were designated referential or expressive based on the number of different general nominals in their cumulative vocabulary records.;The children were videotaped first when each had at least 10 different words, second between 25 and 40, and third at least 50. These data were collected while the children interacted with their mothers during different contexts, three which involved caretaking and three which were considered object focussed. The observational data were coded into categories of function adapted primarily from the systems of Halliday (1975), Dore (1973; 1974), and McShane (1980). Individual functions were subsumed under two global uses of language, the personal-social and object oriented.;The majority of the children shifted from mostly object oriented to mostly personal-social uses of words. Nonlinguistic utterances, coded for Time I only, were used for significantly more personal-social functions by all the children. It was hypothesized that a complexity factor imposed by the dual requirements of talking and interacting in using words for the social oriented functions may account for the shift from more object oriented to social uses of words over time.;Two children with contrasting profiles had a dominance of the same type of functions for all three observations. These children's functional preferences were consistent with their lexical styles. Functional orientation did not predict the acquisition of the lexical styles of the other children. However, functional orientation predicted the frequency of use of general nominal forms in the children's repertoires. The results also indicated that both multifunctional and unifunctional uses of words coexisted.;Level of means-end cognitive ability as measured by the Uzgiris-Hunt (1975) scale did not differentiate among the children in terms of their lexical or functional styles. Maternal speech style, analyzed post hoc for the mother of the referential, object oriented child and the mother of the expressive, personal-social child, indicated that (1) the two mothers differed significantly in the degree to which their speech was focussed on objects and (2) each mother's style matched her child's style. Suggestions for future research were provided.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Speech and Hearing Sciences
