Lexical

Question 1

In addition to looking at what language is being used to do, you should look at the utterance for lexical importance. Rescorla defined three categories for when a child overextends words. These three are:

Answer 1

Categorical, analogical, relational

Question 2

Categorical

Answer 2

When a child uses one word to describe everything in a category. This is also known as using a hypernym (the big label for categories – e.g. dogs) in place of the more specific hyponym (the sub-elements of a hypernym – e.g. Labradors, Poodles).
* For example, a child may apply ‘dog’ to all breeds of dogs.

Question 3

Analogical

Answer 3

When a child uses a word to describe something which is physically (or visually) similar or serves a similar purpose. For example, labelling a van as a car.

Question 4

Relational

Answer 4

When the word used has some form of relation to the incorrect word.
* For example, labelling the road as a car.

Question 5

Lexical development- In 2010, the National Literacy Trust published a list of top 12 most common first words:

Answer 5

• Dada
• Mama
• Cat
• Dog
• More
• Baby
• Ball
• Duck
• Teddy
• Milk
• Gran
• Again

Question 6

• The reasoning behind why ‘mama’ and ‘dada’ are often first has caused debate amongst linguists over the reasoning behind it. Gervain:

Answer 6

• In 2012, Gervain published work which tested babies at two and three days old and discovered that brain activity peaked with reduplicated syllables. But this does not explain why so many of the first words contain variegated syllables.

Question 7

David Crystal

Answer 7

• David Crystal argues that children recognise that their parents get very excited when they say the ‘ma’ and ‘da’ syllable and as a result, increase the frequency they say this.
• But this does not constitute understanding. He states that it will be many months before the child can link their production of ‘mama’ to the concept of the maternal caregiver.

Question 8

Lexical words

Answer 8

Lexical words (sometimes called content or open-class words) carry some form of meaning.

Question 9

Grammatical words

Answer 9

Grammatical words (sometimes called function words or closed words) serve a cohesive purpose in holding the sentence together.

Question 10

Lexical words examples

Answer 10

Nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs

Question 11

Grammatical words examples

Answer 11

Pronouns, prepositions, determiners, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions