UNIVERSITY OF RIJEKA

FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

CHILDREN’S PRODUCTION ABILITIES LAG BEHIND THEIR

COMPREHENSION ABILITIES THROUGHOUT LANGUAGE

DEVELOPMENT

Course: First Language Acquisition

Supervisor: dr.sc. Tihana Kraš, doc.

Student: Dijana Jakovac

Academic year: 2011/2012

Study name: English and Croatian language and literature

First language acquisition is the ability to understand and produce language. How

children acquire language rather than what they acquire is of great interest among researchers.

Also, does comprehension precede production or it is vice versa? In this essay, I will argue

that comprehension comes before production in the acquisition of the following linguistic

domains of language: phonology, morphosyntax, and the lexicon.

At the beginning, it is important to state that before children try to say anything, they

listen. In order to be able to produce speech-like sounds, first they have to learn the sound

system of their language. Infants have inborn speech perception when turning their heads

toward the source of a sound. By the age of one year they have not just been able to

distinguish speech sounds but also have begun to learn words and recognize them. This was

shown with a simple technique introduced by the Russian linguist Shvachkin. This technique

has to do with showing children pairs of pictures whose names are minimal pairs that differ

by only one sound. For example, we can show children the pair of pictures representing a coat

and a goat and ask them to show us the coat or the goat. If a child points to the correct picture,

then he/she can hear the dictinction between the “ k“ and “g“ sounds. Also, thanks to

Shvachkin's method, researchers have shown that children are able to use phonethic

differences in order to differentiate among words. But, as they have pinpointed, children are

not immediately able to make these dictinctions in their own speech, or in other words, that

perception preceedes production. As a consequence, children can pronounce incorrectly the

phonetic contrasts that they have perceived accurately before that (O' Grady, 2005: 143-146).

Here's such an example of Berko and Brown (1960): “One of us spoke to a child who called

his inflated plastic fish a fis. In imitation of the child's pronunciation, the observer said:“This

is your fis?“ “No“, said the child, „my fis.“ He continued to reject the adult's imitation until he

was told, “That is your fish.“ “Yes,“ he said, “my fis.“ (as cited in O' Grady, 2005:147) This

piece of evidence shows that this child can hear the difference between “s“ and “sh“ in adult

speech, but he himself is thus far not able to actually pronounce it correctly. Also, Swingley

and Aslin (2000) and White, Morgan and Wier (2004) stated that children who were presented

with the sentences “Where's the baby? Can you find it?“ or “Where's the vaby? Can you find

it?“ and which were accurately pronounced or mispronounced in combination with two

picures, one of which represented the referent of the sentence, perecived the correct picture

notably more successfully when the word was accurately pronounced (as cited in Lust,

2006:139). All of these indicates that in phonology, production does lag behind perception.

Children have early capacities for perception and are aware of the sound sequences

that of which words are possibly made, long before they acctualy produce these forms. (Hoff

and Shatz, 2006: 151). But children have to learn how to explain the set of compounding

patterns together with the range of affixes (prefixes, suffixes, or infixes) in derived forms.

They seem to save their range of word-forms in memory, then they put to use this range in

understanding unknown conventional or new forms. Here, in the morphological domaine,

comprehension also comes before production. Children at age of three and four years

acquiring English unfailingly recognize the head noun versus the modifier in their

interpretations of new compound nouns. But at the same time, when they are presented with

comparable interpretations and questioned what one could name such a person or thing, they

make mistakes in their production. (Clark, 2009: 280) For example, some children who

produced pull-wagon ('someone who pulls wagons') was given other new form created on the

same scheme (e.g., kick-box), they all the same regarded the rightmost element as the head

(here box). But, the same children then placed the head first in the leftmost opening when they

create and produce a new compound noun by their own. When asked “What could you call

someone who pulls wagons?“, some children answered correctly “A pull-wagon“, but many

addeded the agentive suffix –er to the head in the leftmost opening “A wagon-puller“. (Clark

(1984), Clark, Hecht and Mulford (1986), as cited in Clark, 2009:280). It is interesting that

even though they make errors in production, when they are given futher new compounds,

formed on their own incorrect pattern, and asked to explain them, they regularly spot the

rightmost element as the head. So, when asked for example “What do you think a wall-builder

is?“, they answered “A man that builds walls, someone that builds things.“ To conclude, three

and four-year-olds may be close to perfection at understanfing unknown or new compound

nouns, but their production will not keep pace with comprehension. Children will nonetheless

within time learn that, in compound nouns the head is regularly the rightmost element, yet

when it is created from a verb-root. (Clark, 2009:281)

Furhermore, it is not definitely true that any form that can be produced will be

produced as well. Children's sentence comprehension potentials help us make clear why the

comprehension of lingustic structures seems to come before its production. Shipley, Smith,

and Gleitman (1969) demonstrated that children in spite of not using function words in their

own speech, appear to expect them. (as cited in Fletcher and MacWhinney, 1995:431) Also,

in the one-word stage, children can undersatnd considerably more than they can say. Given

the fact that children have an innate predisposition to observe situations that corresdpond to

what they are hearing. Using the method called the preferential looking paradigm, the child is

put to sit facing two TV monitors. At the same time he/she hears through a loudspeeaker the

sentence like “She's kissing the keys.“ along with the two scenes on the TV monitors. One

scene is displaying a woman kissing keys while carrying a ball and the other a woman kissing

a ball while carrying keys. (Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff (1991), as cited in O' Grady,

2005:116) This experiment shows that when children understand the sentence, they favour the

screen representing the woman kissing the keys, by gazing at it more swiftly and watching it

longer. On the other hand, when children only perceive the isolated words without

understanding them, they look at both screens equally as each scene represents a kissing

action and keys. In short, infants do understand more than they can produce – they are in a

position to interpret whole sentences (such as She's kissing the keys), relatively without any

difficulty, also thanks to the fact that the relations among the parts of the sentence are not

reversible. In other words, it's achievable that a woman is kissing keys, but not that keys are

kissing a woman. (O' Grady, 2005:117-118) Furthermore, the same paradigm was used to test

comprehension of word order with children in the one- and two- word stage. Now they were

given reversible sentences like „Cookie Monster is tickling Big Bird“. One video scene

represented Cookie Monster tickling Big Bird and the other presented Big Bird tickling

Cookie Monster. Because those children were looking longer at the correct scene, Golinkoff

and Hirsh-Pasek (1995) pinpointed that children can understand word order ahead of them

using two-word sentences (as cited in Berko Gleason and Bernstein Ratner, 2008:156).

Finally, all this shows that, also in morphosyntax, comprehension comes beforehand

production and that children are able to understand new compound nouns and than multiword

utterances even though they may not produce them accordingly.

Eventually, according to many diary studies, children around one year of age acquire

their first words by understanding their meanings several months before they start producing

them. Some studies, on the other hand, tried to come up with norms for the acquistion of

words, but mostly focused on children's productive vocabulary and less on receptive

vocabularies. It was only found that children produce their first words around 10 months and

that this appearance of a productive vocabulary results in the fast growth; rather, it takes

several months to burst in production of words, around 18 months. (Ingram, 1989:140-141)

Benedict was the first who presented controlled study of the beginning of comprehension and

production. She examined the vocabulary acquisition of eight children individually within six

months, beforehandly having fixed the ages for acquisition of predetermined numbers of

words for comprehension and production. Results have shown that the beginning of

comprehension is ahead of production fo nearly four months. Also, children comprehended

their first 50 words twice as fast than they produced them. In other words, they acquired 10

words in comprehension in two weeks, but in four weeks in production. (Benedict (1979), as

cited in Ingram, 1989:141) These findings as those of diary studies show that comprehension

ideed precedes production. But, if we look more closely at Benedict's results of individual

children, we can notice that contrasts between the largeness of the comprehension and

production vocabularies can vary immensely. For example, one Benedict's subject's speed of

acquistion of receptive vocabulary was twice as fast as the other one subject had, but on the

other hand, his speed of acquisition of productive vocabulary was twice as slowly as the other

one had. According to that, we can conclude that the speed of acquisition of receptive

vocabulary is the same as or greater than that for the productive vocabulary. Moreover, the

gap between the speed of comprehension and production acquisition varies greatly, with a

standard of about 100 words comprehended at the time of the first words produced. (Ingram,

1989:143) Also, there were some researchers that wanted to show that children before age two

have developed sensitivity to specific spatial categories, mostly using the technique of

preferential looking paradigm. Among them was Bowerman who examined the

comprehension of the semantic categories – put in, for learners of English, and kkita ('fit

tightly') for learners of Korean. His subjects were children between 18 and 23 months old –

twenty them learning English, and ten learning Korean. According to their parent's report, the

majority did not yet use the word put(in) or kkita! The experiment was composed of four pairs

of videotaped actions in order to check if the children comprehended the characteristics of

events that were linked to the two targer words: inclusion for (put) in and tight fit for kkita.

(Bowerman and Choi, 2004:494) The first matching scene “putting pegs tightly into holes in a

wooden block“ was the same for both languages, and the nonmatching scene was “putting

pegs on top of a solid block.“ The second matching scene that represented containment was

“putting Lego pieces into a large plastic container“ for learners of English, and the other

matching scene that represented tight fit was “adding a Lego piece to the top of a stack of

Lego pieces“ for learners of Korean, etc. (Bowerman and Choi, 2004:494) English-speaking

children who understood in looked longer at scenes depicting inclusion disregarding whether

it is tight or loose. On the other hand, Korean-speaking children should gaze longer at scenes

depicting a tight-fitting relation no matter whether the fit involves inclusion or surface

linking, if they understood kkita. Finally, this study shows that English-learning children and

Korean-learning children between 18 and 23 months of age, by this time comprehend in and

kkita (with dependence on their own spatial concepts) but not yet produce them. This means

that their sensitivity to special spatial categories starts to progress in comprehension and in

anticipation of production. (Bowerman and Choi, 2004:496)

To conclude, various research results have supported the state given at the beginning

of this essay – that language comprehension comes before language

production in the acquisiton of phonology, morphosyntax and the lexicon.

It is important to note that this problem between the language production

and language comprehension has not been fully examined and that it

should be a great challenge to linguists in trying to finally resolve it.

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