Young children's response to novel words in a play setting.
Item
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Title
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Young children's response to novel words in a play setting.
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Identifier
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AAI8820847
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identifier
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8820847
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Creator
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Boskey, Madeline L.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Katherine Nelson
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Date
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1988
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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 | Language, Linguistics
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Abstract
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An important aspect of learning language involves the incorporation of unfamiliar words into a child's existing knowledge about language. A child may respond to an unknown word in several ways. Based on the linguistic and nonlinguistic context of the utterance in which it occurred, the child might "guess" the meaning of the word. An alternative would be to specifically inquire about the meaning of the unfamiliar word.;A child's choice of strategies for dealing with the new word will affect the maintenance of the discourse situation in which it occurs. By "guessing" the meaning of a word, the disruption to the ongoing discourse would be negligible. Alternatively, if a child specifically queries the meaning of a new word, the flow would be momentarily disrupted.;The present study investigated children's responses to new labels for familiar objects and actions in the course of a play situation. Twenty-four two year olds participated in the study. The experimenter collected a language sample for each child to explore the relationship of measures such as Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) (Brown, 1973), percent of imitation, and degree of Referential/Expressiveness (Nelson, 1973), to performance in the experiment. Children subsequently heard a protocol of sentences that concerned familiar objects and actions and that varied according to whether the target word was the familiar name for the referent or an unfamiliar nonsense word. Several other variables were manipulated, including the type of sentence, the position and part of speech of the target word, to examine the potential effects on performance.;The experimenter coded children's verbal and nonverbal behavior following each item in the protocol. Three response categories, varying in terms of their appropriateness to the discourse, accounted for the children's behavior.;In general, the findings indicate that two year olds were more interested in maintaining their communicative play situation than in acquiring specific new names for familiar objects and actions. The type of sentence in which the nonsense word occurred, as well as the age and MLU of the children, affected performance.
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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.
