variability

[Nelson, Katherine]

Dear colleagues,

I am just catching up on the exchange re variability and typicality in language, specifically in word learning, and I'd like to thank Philip Dale for sending the paper on typicality measures.

I have several brief comments and additions:

I prefer "individuality" to "idiosyncratic" as the latter term implies a norm from which the child has deviated, rather than simply an alternative and perhaps individual pathway.  We know from many studies across the universe of culltures, social classes, communities, languages, etc. that there are different entry points to a language.  This is related to the second point.

As is now generally recognized from the beginning word learning, and language learning in general is a social and cultural enterprise.  Rather than musing on whether the words learned are influenced by maternal characteristics, we need to study how children learn words that are used by others in social activities.  That these activities may be typical of a period of development may well influence both the words heard and words learned, thus accounting for different 'typical' words learned at different ages.  Of course young children may also pick up a word for sheer fun or because it can be pronounced with pleasure, or for some other reason.

In my original study (Nelson, 1973, which relied on mother's diaries for 18 children over the second year) I tried to capture both the individuality and the change over time with a set of tree diagrams showing how words in certain groups expanded as the vocabulary grew.  For example, some children expanded animal names, forming a sort of category (no doubt related to picture book "reading").  Another expanded household items (e.g., spoon, cup, clock, etc.), clothes, or foods, whereas others (the non-noun learners) expanded on social expressions. These were not pre-determined semantic categories, but rather ones that emerged for each child independently. As I have observed previously, the grammatical categories of noun and verb may be of interest to later development, but in the first phase of learning, words seem to be added in meaningful clusters related to activities.  Unfortunately, I did not and do not have a measure for this, but the phenomenon appeared quite clearly in the tree diagrams constructed from words learned  from 10 to 50 words.  If anyone is interested in these (and the 1973 monograph is not accessible) I could make copies available.

I also wanted to point out that maternal influence on what we called style was studied longitudinally by June Hampson, who found that "referential mothers" (identified independently in advance) had "referential children" whereas "expressive mothers" tended to have "expressive children" in the 13-18month period.  However, at the latter time the mothers and children were more similar, suggesting that each might be influencing the other over time.

References for these studies:


Nelson, K. (1973). "Structure and strategy in learning to talk." Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 38 (1-2, Serial No. 149).

Nelson, K. (1981). "Individual differences in language development: Implications for development and language." Developmental Psychology 17: 170-187.

Hampson, J. and K. Nelson (1993). "The relation of maternal language to variation in rate and style of language acquisition." Journal of child language 20: 313-342.










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