Personal Narrative: The Five Words

At the Word Level, Felipe scored 7 out of 10 problems correctly. The 3 problems he missed involved tapping for the number of words he heard in a sentence. He tapped one more word than the total number of words in the sentence by tapping twice for a two-syllable word instead of one tap. For example, in the sentence, “My mother is calling me,” the total number of taps should be five for the five words. Felipe tapped twice for the word “calling,” resulting in six taps instead of five.

Identify the key vocabulary (i.e., developmentally appropriate sounds, words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs) essential for children to use during the learning segment.

For example, children are taught to take a single-syllable word such as hot apart into its three individual letters, pronounce a phoneme for each letter in turn /h, o, t/, and ‘blend’ the phonemes together to create a word – ‘hot’. Another method of teaching phonics is to use ‘analytic phonics’, which is where early readers are introduced to the whole word, before being taught to analyse them into their component parts (Wyse et. al, 2007). Hall (2006) argues that early readers typically move from discriminating among large units, such as whole words, to smaller units, such as parts of words and individual letters. Putting forward the case that a synthetic only approach would be disadvantageous to some early readers, and that the analytical approach is often accessed first by many readers, she goes on to state that the sensitivity to onset and rime (the initial sound followed by the final group, as in c-at and b-at), which is the focus of an analytic approach, comes first developmentally. It would be important to mention that Hall (2006) also states synthetic phonics is crucial since the beginner reader needs to get to the phoneme, or individual sound (the focus of a synthetic approach). Furthermore, Hall (2006) also states that pattern recognition is

List 5 new vocabulary words and 5 expressions that caught your attention while reading this chapter. Write the page number and the definitions when possible.

2). Also, it is important to remember in Chapter 15, the reader is told of an

Your child will already be talking up a storm by the time it's time to go to preschool. However, they

1. List and define 25 unfamiliar words that you found in the book and the page numbers where the words appear. Use dictionary or dictionary.com. If

After the first couple of months, infants become more interactive with their surroundings. They are very curious and have the desire to get in touch with the world. In order to engage in such activity, they begin by utilizing their sense of touch by placing numerous objects in their mouth. In the upcoming months, infants start to use different senses such as hearing and sight to get in touch with their surroundings. Before they are even able to speak, their caregivers speak to them in differentiated speech and vocalizations as opposed to adults. The intonation and rhythm in the adult’s voice is usually different around young children, causing them to be able to get their attention. Over the years, speech language pathologists have conducted a large number of studies where it demonstrates children’s’ fascination with speech generated by humans. Levi, as summarized by the ASHA leader, conducted a study where the children successfully recited words after distinguishing the familiar and unfamiliar voices of the speakers.

Although children babble, children do not typically produce many words during the first year of life. Children begin to babble and coo as early as 2-months, the sounds children produce rarely have meaning to the child. During this time, children can also produce protowords, or words that have consistent meaning to the child but have no similarities to the actual word. These protowords, such as “binky” for “pacifier”, are the precursor to word and vocabulary development for a child.

The sound that they find easiest to pronounce will determine what the child’s first words would be. Sounds such as “bye-bye” and “nigh-nigh” (Berk, 2013, pp.373-374). As they get older their pronunciation will become clear and understandable. According to social interactionist perspective children are born to communicate and language is acquired through a social setting (Fellowes and Oakley, 2014, p. 51). Adults simplify words to talk to toddlers such as “bunny” for rabbit.

Reduplicative set seems common when an infant starts learning a language. For most people, the first words that they learned are “mama” and “papa”. It is also a language development process for young children. They use reduplicative sets frequently in order to enable the child to produce polysyllabic utterances without articulating complex structures. Ingram argues that children produce those reduplicative sounds to compensate their inability to produce the whole word. So that when they develop the sophisticated sounding techniques, they would use “mommy” and “daddy” instead of “mama” and “papa”.

Phonotactics are key in the order and position of sounds. They can also bring evidence to the question of development because infants can learn new phonotactics in the first year. In the experiment half the infants were exposed to the same speaker and the other half were given three different speakers. The experimenters chose a difficult pattern. Extreme exemplar models assume that, before extensive experience, indexical and linguistic information are conflated and kept in memory. Results show that both four month olds and elven month olds should be able to notice the sound pattern no matter who the speaker

However, babbling is not limited to speech, as concluded in the 1991 study by Petitto and Marentette. There are many trajectories of babbling, though this essay will only focus on four; 1) syllabic reduplication, 2) syllabic forms leading to first words, 3) typical age onset of both, and 4) how babbling is part of the linguistic structure of language. First, reduplicated babbling is repeated syllabic utterances such as “mamamama”, that typically occurs between 6 and 9 months (Galotti 152). Petitto and Marentette’s study found that deaf children exposed to sign language also babble through signing in reduplication “with a reduced subset of combinatorial units that were members of the phonetic inventory of signed languages” (251). Furthermore, at 10 months of age, their study reported deaf children were actively manually babbling syllables, which is around the same age that hearing infants produce such sounds, as noted above. Next, Galotti explains that around 12 months of age, infants begin to speak their first recognizable words, which are often taken from syllabic babbling, such as “bababa” to the eventual use of “ba” to refer to a ball (152). Similarly, “deaf infants produce their first signs form the pool of phonetic and syllabic types rehearsed in their babbling” at around 12 months of age (Petitto and Marentette 1495). Finally, as can be seen by this progression

I didn’t know how to say it. I didn't know when to say it. I didn’t even know if I wanted to tell them. I just knew I had this feeling in my gut that wouldn’t go away until I told them. I knew I needed to tell them. So, when my mom and I were going on a walk I was about to tell her, but for some reason I didn’t. I don't know why.

Then, cooing appears when the child is between six to eight weeks old, where the infant demonstrates happy vowel like sounds (Hoff, 2006). At age sixteen weeks infants begin to demonstrate laughter and vocal play (Hoff, 2006). Between six and nine month old babies begin to produce babbling sounds, then they utter their first word around age one (Hoff, 2006). When children speak their first word it is usually as an isolated unit (Goldin-Meadow, 2006), and not considered a major step in phonological development (Hoff, 2006). Children then learn that their first spoken word is composed of smaller parts, which is known as morphology, and that the word can be used as a building block for larger sentences called syntax (Goldin-Meadow, 2006). A child’s first word goes farther then communicating a message between the child and communicative partner, the word retains symbolic meaning (Goldin-Meadow, 2006). At age eighteen months phonological processes develop, in which the child’s speech characteristics begin to transform (Hoff, 2006). Subsequent to eighteen months the child’s vocabulary grows and with this growth the child is able to phonemically represent a sound with the mental representation of every word that possesses a sound (Hoff, 2006).