Home Language 123: Core Words: toddlers 3-4 Yrs 100
Adult Starter GCV Dolch
Words: Mick English Mum Teachers Databases: LAM & PeRT Progress Monitor LLL flashcards
THE UNIVERSAL ORDER of LANGUAGE ACQUISITION - BROWN'S STAGES:
In a study carried out
in the 1970s Roger Brown identified the order in which children acquire
grammatical markers, and that this order appears to be universal:
1 the use of -ing added to a verb
2 prepositions such as 'on' or 'in'
3 the use of 's' to form plurals
4 irregular past tenses, for example, 'sang' and 'hit'
5 possessives, for example, 'Debbie's hat'
6 the use of 'the' and 'a', which are known as articles
7 adding 's' to third person verbs such as 'he wants'
8 regular past tenses such as 'climbed' and 'clapped'
9 the use of auxiliary verbs such as 'am singing'
CORE WORDS LISTS & LANGUAGE SAMPLING - links at top right of this page
Toddlers' 25 most common words are used for 96.3% of everything they say. For older children and adults the same 25 words make up 45% of everything we say.
In March 2003 Professor Bruce Baker gave us two lists of high frequency words from
language samples - the 330 most common words collected from speaking pre-schoolers, and the 100 most common words from an interview with an AAC user. Learning that EVERYONE uses these same few hundred words for over 80% of everything we say, was a life changing event for us. We didn't know which of the 6,000 words on our son's communication aid were most important for us to teach him before getting these wordlists.
The AAC Institute general core vocabulary is 467 words, compiled via principled research and analysis of many language samples.
The high frequency of occurrence / percentage of sample of a very few words at the top of any language sample would look similar to this graph from the 100 words list.
CORE vs FRINGE VOCABULARY
Core words are the basis of interactive communication. Core vocabulary
consists of those few hundred words used for 85% of what we say. Core
words are structure words such as pronouns, verbs, determiners, adverbs,
adjectives, and prepositions. Almost no core words are nouns, and even
fewer are object nouns, the only nouns with an obvious picture association.
Extended (fringe) vocabulary is made up of the remaining thousands
of words. Most nouns are part of the extended vocabulary. Extended vocabulary
words tend to be content or topic specific. These words are important,
but are not used nearly as often as core vocabulary words.
Generally, core vocabulary is best accessed using semantic compaction*,
and extended vocabulary is best accessed using alphabet based systems
or single meaning pictures (like real photos or symbols).
The above quote on Core vs Fringe Vocabulary is from AAC
Language Issues, downloadable from the AAC Research and Resources
section of Prentke Romich's website.
Three more articles on core vocabulary are printed to the GCV (General Core Vocabulary) page.
*Semantic compaction refers to the arrangement of words in logical groups,
sorted by related meanings or word type, e.g. with all the -ING
verbs together, all the -ED verbs together, all the PLACEMENT words together,
and all the MEAT words together.
STRUCTURE CHART FOR LLL WORD GROUPS
This language organisation structure chart was made as a sort of site map when we were making core explorer and core drawers (core drawers notes) analogies for LLL. It shows how words are arranged in the LLL communication software,
grouped by part of speech. We store all our resources
in directories that follow this arrangement so the storage and retrieval
process has become second nature. Our sorting and file management skills
and our knowledge of the structure of language are mutually enhanced
this way, automatically and without thinking about it.
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT - What the books say:
The following extracts are from Understanding Children's Language &
Literacy, by Penny Mukherji and T eresa O'Dea, Chapter 3 - The Development
of Language and Communication, p 47:
Questions and negatives
When children first start using questions they tend to make the same
type of error consistently. It is as if they follow a set of rules,
but not the adult rules of grammar. For example, when they first start
to use questions beginning with words such as when, who, what and where
children often get the words in the wrong order. For instance, they
may say Why it is laughing?
In the same way, when children start to use negatives, they are able
to use not to make a sentence negative, but are unable to use the auxiliary
verb. They may say things such as There no biscuits instead of There
are no biscuits.
Over-regularisation
Once children have learned a grammatical rule, they begin to incorporate
it into their speech. This can lead to some characteristic errors, such
as when the children start to use 's' to make plurals. Children may
start referring to two sheep as sheeps or two feet and feets. This is
a logical error and it will be some time before the children learn all
the exceptions to the rule.
The next extracts are from 'The Development of Language and Literacy
in Children' by Marian Whitehead. Please excuse the length of the quote.
Our babies communicate with us long before they talk - they do it from
birth. They get in touch by gazing at us, making faces at us and by
moving their hands, arms, legs and toes in response to our attention
and our voices. We become skilled at listening to our babies and watching
them closely. This helps us to get to know them and interpret their
messages and their meanings; it helps us to share our lives and activities
with them.
Our babies become talkers by communicating without words and by constantly
watching and listening to all that goes on around them. We tend to share
our conversations and little stories about the ups and downs of daily
life with wakeful and attentive babies and toddlers.
We even expect responses from them. So we look at them, pause in our
talk and give them time to find the appropriate sounds or words. Later,
we tell them the words they ask for or seem to need, and we repeat important
words or phrases frequently. We really make it possible for them to
give names to their world and talk about it....
Emerging language enables very young children to do two important things:
to get things done, including involving other people, and to comment
on the world.
First words are usually about such things as family members, daily
routines, food, vehicles, toys and pets. These groupings are known to
linguists as semantic fields. These semantic sets also include those
important words which get people to do things for you, such as 'up',
'walk', 'out' and 'gone'.
Two other very important words are acquired in these early days - 'no'
and 'yes' - and usually in that order.
Small children are able, in their second year, to combine words together
in original ways which convey meanings to others, such as 'no more miaow',
'door uppy' (open the door) and ‘dadda gone’.
From two to four they start to tidy up irregular plurals and add 's'
to all of them, resulting in 'mouses' and 'foots', and regularise irregular
past tenses, totally spontaneously and un-imitated, like 'goed' to the
shops and 'rided' on the bus.
Some three- and four-year-olds have been heard to talk about 'lawning'
(mowing the lawn) and to announce 'I seat belted myself’ (Dark,
1982, pp.390-402).
These errors are ones to cheer about, for they are evidence that the
child's mind is a powerful tool for processing and producing the rules
of language.
During this period children's longer word combinations become easier
for adults to understand… by the gradual trial-and-error use of
'and', 'because', 'if’ and so on.
Children's questions no longer rely solely on a rising tone of voice,
but use the linguistic terms 'why', 'who', 'where' and 'how'.
By the age of four the physical maturity of the nervous system and
the finer muscle control over the mouth, throat and tongue, and even
the presence of teeth, make the young child's pronunciation of languages
very much closer to the adult forms and easier to understand.
We are all conversational partners for our children. We are all models
for our children of how to use language. The daily caring, talking,
playing and routine reading and writing we do with our children shapes
their language development and their thinking.
Our children begin by talking about the people they know, the events
of their days, their own feelings, the food they eat, their toys, animals
and family pets, and their own feelings and ideas about things. These
topics of conversation remain very important all our lives and our children
learn to talk about them by telling stories.
Their conversations with us are full of little tales about falling
down, losing things, meeting people, seeing animals or cars, feeling
frightened or finding something interesting. These are everyday stories
of 'what happened and how I feel about it'; they are not very different
from the stories in family reminiscences, TV 'soaps', novels and myths.
We cannot separate language development from the rest of our lives
and teach it separately to our children. What they do successfully with
language, they do as part and parcel of doing really important things.
Things like telling us about their quarrels, celebrating their good
times, reading their names on labels, or writing a message of kisses
on a letter to a far-away grandparent. Throughout our lives language
development is bound up with just being ourselves.
Formerly Senior Lecturer in education at Goldsmiths College, University
of London, Marian Whitehead is the author of several standard texts on
the development of language and literacy in the early years. She advises
schools, care settings, training providers and various publications on
ways of working with families and communities to support young children's
language and literacy learning. She is based in Norwich and is the 'critical
friend' of Earlham Early Years Centre, the only Early Excellence Centre
in Norfolk.
Marianis currently writing a book with a colleague in Australia about
supporting the literacy development of under-5s. Her most recent publication
is a study of sharing picture books with her grandson Dylan, from 8 weeks
to 3 years (Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 2 (3) 2002).
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT - On the web
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