Proceedings Fonetik 2009 - Institutionen för lingvistik

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Proceedings, FOETIK 2009, Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm UniversityMajor parts-of-speech in child language – division inopen and close class wordsE. Klintfors, F. Lacerda and U. SundbergDepartment of Linguistics, Stockholm University, StockholmAbstractThe purpose of this study was to assess relationsbetween major parts-of-speech in 14-to43-months-old infants. Therefore a division inopen class and close class words was made.Open class words consist of nouns, verbs andadjectives, while the group of close class wordsis mainly constituted of grammatical wordssuch as conjunctions, prepositions and adverbs.The data was collected using the Swedish EarlyCommunicative Development Inventory, a versionof the MacArthur Communicative DevelopmentInventory. The number of open andclose class words was estimated by summarizingitems from diverse semantic categories. Thestudy was performed as a mixture of longitudinaland cross-sectional data based on 28completed forms. The results showed that whilethe total number of items in the children’s vocabulariesgrew as the child got older; the proportionaldivision in open vs. close class words– proximally 90-10% – was unchanged.IntroductionThis study is performed within the multidisciplinaryresearch project: Modeling InteractiveLanguage Learning 1 (MILLE, supported by theBank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation). Thegoal of the project is to study how general purposemechanisms may lead to emergence oflinguistic structure (e.g. words) under the pressureof exposure to the ambient language. Thehuman subject part of the project use data frominfant speech perception and production experimentsand from adult-infant interaction. Thenon-human animal part of the project use datafrom gerbil discrimination and generalizationexperiments on natural speech stimuli. And finally,within the modeling part of the project1 A collaboration between Department of Linguistics,Stockholm University (SU, Sweden), Department of Psychology,Carnegie Mellon University (CMU, USA), andDepartment of Speech, Music and Hearing, Royal Instituteof Technology (KTH, Sweden).mathematical models simulating infants’ andanimals’ performances are implemented. Inthese models the balance between variance inthe input and the formation of phonologicallikecategories under the pressure of differentamounts of available memory representationspace are of interest.The aim of the current study is to explorethe major parts-of-speech in child language.Therefore an analysis of questionnaire databased on parental reports of their infants’ communicativeskills regarding open and close classwords was carried out.BackgroundThe partition in words that belong to the socalled open class and those that belong to closeclass is a basic division in major parts-ofspeech.The open class is “open” in the sensethat there is no upper limit for how many unitsthe class may contain, while the close class hasrelatively few members. The open and closeclass words also tend to have different functionsin the language: the open class words oftencarry contents, while the close class wordsmodify the relations of the semantically loadedcontent words.Why would children pay attention to openclass words? Children, as well as adults, lookfor meaning in what they see and hear. Therefore,the areas of interest and the cognitive developmentof the child are naturally factors thatconstrain what is learned first. Close classwords seldom refer to something concrete thatcan be pointed out in the physical world in theway open class words do (Strömqvist, 2003).Also, close class words are not expected to belearned until the child has reached certaingrammatical maturity (Håkansson, 1998). Perceptualprominence and frequency are otherfactors that influence what is learned first(Strömqvist, 1997). Prosodic features such aslength and stress make some content wordsmore salient than others. Also, if a word occurs126
Proceedings, FOETIK 2009, Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm Universitymore often in the language input of the child, itis easier to recognize.Estimations of children’s use of open vs.close class words may be based on appreciationsof types and occurrences. For example, ina longitudinal study on four Swedish childrenand their parents it was shown that the 20 mostfrequent types of words stand for approximately35-45% of all the word occurrences in childlanguage, as well as in adult’s speech directedtowards children (Strömqvist, 1997). And evenmore notably, there were almost none openclass words among these 20 most frequentwords in child language or in child-directedspeech (CDS) in the Swedish material. On thecontrary, close class words such as de, du, va, e,ja, den, å, så constituted the most commonword forms. These word forms were most oftenunstressed and phonologically/phonetically reduced(e.g. the words were monosyllabic, andthe vowels were centralized). Nevertheless, itshould be mentioned that the transcriptionsused were not disambiguated in the sense thatone sound might stand for much more than thechild is able to articulate. For example, the frequente might be generalized to signify är (eng.is), det (eng. it/that), ner (eng. down) etc.In the current study, the questionnairesbased on parental reports prompted for wordstypes produced by the child. The use of wordswas differentiated by whether the word in questionwas used “occasionally” or “often” by thechild, but no estimations of number of wordoccurrences were made. Therefore the materialsused in the current study allow only forcomparison of types of words used.Based on the earlier study by Strömqvist weshould thus expect our data to show large andmaybe growing proportion of close class words.For example, the proportion of open vs. closeclass words measured at three different timepoints, corresponding to growing vocabularysizes, could progress as follows: 90-10%, 80-20%, 70-30% etc. But on the other hand, thetypically limited amount of close class words inlanguages should be reflected in the sample andtherefore our data should – irrespective of thechild’s vocabulary size – reveal large and stableproportion of open class words as compared toclose class words, measured at different timepoints corresponding to growing vocabularysizes (e.g. 90-10%, 90-10%, 90-10% etc.).Eriksson and Berglund (1995) indicate thatSECDI can to certain to extent to be used forscreening purposes to detect and follow upchildren who show tendencies of delayed oratypical language development. The currentstudy is a step in the direction for finding referencedata for typical development of open vs.close class words. Atypical development ofclose class words might thus give informationon potentially deviant grammatical development.MethodThe Swedish Early Communicative DevelopmentInventory (SECDI) based on parental reportsexists in two versions, one version onwords & gestures for 8-to 16-months-old childrenand the other version on words & sentencesfor 16-to-28-months-old children. In this studythe latter version, divided in checklists of 711words belonging to 21 semantic categories, wasused. The inventory may be used to estimatereceptive and productive vocabulary, use ofgestures and grammar, maximal length of utterance,as well as pragmatic abilities (Eriksson &Berglund, 1995).SubjectsThe subjects were 24 Swedish children (13girls, and 11 boys, age range 6.1- to 20.6-months by the start point of the project) randomlyselected from the National Swedish addressregister (SPAR). Swedish was the primarylanguage spoken in all the families with the exceptionof two mothers who primarily spokeFrench and Russian respectively. The parents ofthe subjects were not paid to participate in thestudy. Children who only participated duringthe first part of the collection of longitudinaldata (they had only filled in the version ofSECDI for 8-to 16-months-old children) wereexcluded from the current study resulting in 28completed forms filled by 17 children (10 girls,7 boys, age range 14- to 43-months at the timepoint of data collection). The data collected wasa mixture of longitudinal and cross-sectionaldata as follows: 1 child completed 4 forms, 1child completed 3 forms, 6 children completed2 forms, and 9 children completed 1 form.MaterialsTo estimate the number of open class words thesections through A2 to A12, as well as A14 andA15 were included. The semantic categories ofthese sections are listed in Table 1. Section A1-Sound effects/animal sounds (e.g. mjau) andA13-Games/routines (e.g. god natt, eng. goodnight) were not considered as representative127
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