Object knowledge and the emergence of language

Abstract

Infants' spontaneous play with objects was examined for evidence of developments in object knowledge in relation to the emergence of words and the single-word period in language development. Subjects were 7 girls and 7 boys, from different ethnic and economic backgrounds, who were studied longitudinally from 9 months to 26 months of age. Two types of displacements of objects in relation to one another were identified in the children's play: Separations and Constructions. The development of Constructions was associated with the emergence of words, and Constructions increased with age while Separations decreased. The development of Specific constructions, which account for knowledge of the particular properties of objects, was more strongly associated with a Vocabulary Spurt at the end of the single-word period than with chronological age. Despite the wide variation in the infants' ages when developments in language and play were reached, relations between achievements in the two domains were consistent among them, as confirmed with the Friedman test, p ≤ .001. The results are discussed in terms of the cognitive developments required for play with objects and saying words.

Reexamining the Vocabulary Spurt.

“…In this analysis and in the nouns-only analysis, described below, an inflection point anywhere between 20 and 90 words was accepted, because the vocabulary spurt is thought to occur at around 50 words. A minimum of 20 words was decided upon because many investigators agree that before 20 words is too early for a true spurt (e.g., Lifter & Bloom, 1989). A maximum of 90 was chosen because data from most of our participants ended at 90 words after the last 2 weeks of data were removed.…”

Shape and the First Hundred Nouns

“…These points typically converge at a time when children are between 18 and 20 months of age and have a productive lexicon of 50 to 100 words. This first substantive jump in vocabulary has also been correlated with a number of other cognitive advances, including categorization (Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1987), object play (Lifter & Bloom, 1989), and object permanence (Corrigan, 1978).…”

“…Most global descriptions of early vocabulary growth report that for the majority of children, development proceeds from a slow and gradual increase in the number of new words produced to a faster and more noticeable increase (Bates, Bretherton, & Synder, 1988;Benedict, 1979;Dromi, 1987;Gershkoff-Stowe & Smith, 1997;Goldfield & Reznick, 1990;Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1987;Lifter & Bloom, 1989). This increased rate has been called the naming explosion or vocabulary spurt.…”

“…Under this conceptualization, a rate shift was often located at a particular point in development, measured as the first substantive jump in vocabulary. For example, Lifter and Bloom (1989) proposed as a marker of the vocabulary spurt the first week children added 3 new words to their productive vocabulary, given a minimum of 20 words in the lexicon, whereas Mervis and Bertrand (1994) defined the spurt as 10 new words within a 14-day period, including at least 5 object words. These points typically converge at a time when children are between 18 and 20 months of age and have a productive lexicon of 50 to 100 words.…”

Early Predictors of Communication Development in Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Joint Attention, Imitation, and Toy Play

“…Play provides the child with opportunities for social interaction and social communication, as well as a context for constructing representations of intentional states and knowledge (Bloom, 1993;Lifter & Bloom, 1989, 1998Piaget, 1952). In typical development, functional, or pre-symbolic, play emerges during the first year, while symbolic play begins to emerge around 1 year of age and becomes increasingly complex over the second year of life.…”