Children develop semantic skills gradually, learning a few words per week at first and then experiencing a vocabulary burst where they learn around 5 new words per day. By age 5, the average child has a vocabulary of around 6,000 words. Children use principles like fast mapping and whole object assumption to efficiently learn new words and their meanings. Their ability to learn and apply grammatical rules like plurals and past tense is evidenced by tests like the WUG test and their tendency to overregularize irregular verbs. Mean length of utterance (MLU) can measure children's developing syntactic skills as they start combining words.

1. CHILD’S SEMANTIC
DEVELOPMENT
Student: H. BİLOKCUOĞLU

2. Semantic development: gradual acqusition of words and the
meanings they carry
-First words are usually produced at around the first year of birth.
-It is a slow but a gradual process in which a child, perhaps, learns a
couple of words a week.
-Some social words like bye-bye, hello, etc., object words, and
command words are initially learnt.
-Words learning speeds up dramatically after several months when
first words are produced. This usually emerges when child’s
vocabulary is about 50-100 words. This is called ‘vocabulary
burst’.

3. -A sudden and rapid increase of word gaining in young child
-It is estimated that the average five year old child gains about 6000
words, because:
-a child is estimated to know 100 words at the age of 18 months, which
is equal to 5900 words over the next 3.5 years, about 5 words a day
A child has that insight that everthing has a name and
there is a name for everything.

4.  Fast mapping is one way children learn what a particular word
means. When they hear a word for the first time, kids can often
figure out what it means. This instinctive method of learning uses
information the child already knows to help him or her place the
word in the right context. Often, the kids narrow down the
meaning by excluding possibilities that already have words
attached to them and apply the unknown word to the object or
action that does not already have a name.
 First described in 1978 by Carey and Bartlett, fast mapping is
usually applied to children. Kids do not learn their mother tongue
through active teaching but rather through picking up words and
their meanings through everyday life. For instance, the concept of
a black cat is understood by children who identify the word cat as
a particular sort of animal and also as a particular inanimate
representation of that animal in a book or as a toy. The concept
of black enters their minds as a colour that can apply to many
objects because they hear it used in this context.

5. According to Ellen Markman (1991) there are
three word learning principles:
*the whole object assumption (words refer to an object rather than
to its parts or features)
*the mutual exclusivity assumption (another label can be used to
refer to a feature or part of an object)
*the taxonomic assumption (labels should be extended to an object
of the same kind rather than an object that is thematically
related)

6. * UNDERGENERALISATION
-Using a word in a very narrow sense, for instance
using the word ‘cat’ only for your own pet.
* OVERGENERALISATION
-Using a word too broadly, e.g, using ‘cat’ to call
not only cats but also dogs, cows, and the other
animals
-young children ususally make overgenarlisations
to fill their ‘lexical gap’.

7. *Young children start to make simple combinations with words shortly after
the emergence of vocabulary burst, for e.g; ‘mommy sock’
*early word combinations usually contain simple recurrence, negation,
possession and actor-action utterences. For example:
-Recurrence ‘’More bottle’’
-Negation ‘’No bottle’’
-Possession ‘’ My bottle’’
-Actor-action ‘’ Baby eat’’

8. 14 EARLY LEARNT
MORPHEMES:
MLU
 Plural –s
 Possessive –s
 Progressive –ing
 Past –ed
 Irregualar past
 Third person –s
 In, on
 Copula be, aux.be
(contracted&uncontracted)
 Mean Lengh of Utterance in
morphemes can be employed to
measure a child’s syntactic
development.

9.  Mean length of utterance (MLU) is the average number of
morphemes per utterance. It is an index of expressive
language development used beyond the stage of single
words, when a child uses two or more words together in an
utterance. It is calculated in 100 spontaneous utterances by
counting the number of mor Mean length
of utterence (MLU) is the average number of morphemes
per utterance. It is an index of expressive language
development used beyond the stage of single words, when a
child uses two or more words together in an utterance. It is
calculated in 100 spontaneous utterances by counting the
number of morphemes in each utterance divided by the total
number of utterances. MLU is used as a benchmark to assess
individual differences and developmental changes in
grammatical development in children in the early stages of
language acquisition.

10. •It is obvious that children are accually learning the syntactic rules
Good evidence that they are learning is the ‘WUG TEST’ developed
by Berko (1958). They treat words perfectly they have never heard
before.
Another evidence could be children’s overregularisation of
syntactic patterns.

11. The WUG TEST
Children are also capable of doing this for
possessive, progressive, and past morphemes

12. OVERREGULARISATION
*misapplication of morpho-syntactic
rules
*this can typically be seen with
irregular verbs and forms, for example,
eat-eated, go-goed, put-puted etc.,
mouse-mouses, child-childs
*studies demonstrate that children as
old as seven often make
overregularisations, just like adults
learning another language.
*it is a typical mistake for young
learners to do double markings as well,
like ‘wented’ or ‘mices’.

13.  Children of 3 years old productively use all of
these morphemes on novel words
 -ing is acquired the earliest
 Plural, possessive, and past allomorphs are
what follow the ing form
 The extra vowels in endings are acquired a
little later, at the age of four, children regularly
apply the correct allomorph to the root.
(Brown, 1973)

14.  Berko, J. (1958). The Child's Learning of English
Morphology. Word, 14, 150 177.
 Brown, R. (1973) A first language: The early stages.
Oxford, England: Harvard University Press.
 Carey, S. & Bartlett, E. (1978). Acquiring a single new
word. Proceedings of the Stanford Child Language
Conference, 15, 17-29. (Republished in Papers and
Reports on Child Language Development 15, 17-29)
 Markman, E. M. (1991). The whole-object, taxonomic, and
mutual exclusivity assumptions as initial constraints on
word meanings. In S. A. Gelman, J. P. Byrnes, S. A.