Language: What Is Fast Mapping?

As you work with 3-year-old Effie, you keep track of all the new words she uses. You find that, on average, Effie uses two or three new words every week over a period of several months. Based on this information, Effie’s language development:

There have been many cases of censorship for this book, one instance being at Venado Middle School in Irvine, California in 1992. Students were provided the book, only to have all the “hells” and “damns” blacked out. After parents, students, and media protested, the school eventually gave in and agreed to discontinue the use of the censored copies. The initial reasoning of this censorship was to dissuade the use of profanity in their students. However, according to Cursing in America by Timothy Jay, one of the leading scholars in profanity, the average adolescent uses 80-90 swear words in a day. Undoubtedly, some being much worse than “hell” or “damn”. It is not just in casual locations where youth swear, but it is increasing in the classroom as well. Students are

The profanity that is made reference to in this case includes words like goddamn, sex, hell, and others. For example, “I hope to hell when I do die someone has the sense…” (The Catcher in the Rye.). The recommendation to ban a book from school courses such as a means of protecting children for profanity is an escapist approach by critics. Profanity is very excessive in today’s society, the world sex is said after an interval of six minutes on major television channels.

The book also encounters the words: sonuvaitch, bastard, crap, god damn, Jesus, Christ-sake, and more. The F-word is also mentioned six times in the book. Many people wonder that since the average adolescent uses roughly 80 to 90 swear words a day, why should it matter that they read about them? The point for books to be banned by their use of profanity is that reading bad words does have an influence on the reader especially at an age were they are very impressionable. Since many eighth grade students are not allowed to use these curse words in school or at home why should they be read them in school? If these children read these words in school they may feel compelled to repeat them in school or other places were they are not appropriate to use. Therefore reading a book with curse words may cause the frequency of student swearing to increase.

Dramatic steps in language acquisition are seen from ages two through six. The explosion of vocabulary is attributed to the connection of a new vocabulary word to new concept using a process called fast-mapping. Children only start to grasp the basics of grammar by constructing simple sentences. Overregularization occurs when acquired grammatical rules are used so consistently that they overuse the rules and miss the exceptions to the rules.

He found that children have a biological ability to detect phonology, syntax and semantics. Environmentally, children’s vocabularies are linked to family’s socioeconomic status. The child’s language is affected by the frequency of parents talking, child directed speech, and mother’s verbal response to infants. Language milestones are from 0-2 years. From birth children cry to communicate, at 2-4 months they coo, at 5 months they begin to understand words, at 6 they begin to babble, at 7-11 months they change from universal language to their specific language (their parents), from 8-12 months they use gestures to communicate, at 13 months the child’s first word is spoken, at 18 months vocabulary spurt starts, and from 18-24 the child uses two word utterances and understands words rapidly.

They compared whether children with cochlear implants, children the same age with normal hearing, and children with the same vocabularies could fast map, retain, and extend new words while being shown their “unfamiliar object referents” (Walker and McGregor 2013). They concluded that children with cochlear implants only had difficulties in retention of producing the word and being able to comprehend it. Fast mapping and extension for children with cochlear implants, compared to same aged children with normal hearing and children with the same vocabularies, proved to be unaffected (Walker & McGregor

A child begins to form words somewhere between ten and eighteen months of age. The first word of a child is often momma or dada. The child repeats the sounds or utterances heard from the adults around him. Speech does not actually occur until the spoken word is deliberate and meant to communicate. By the time a child reaches kindergarten he has likely gained a 2000 – 3000 word vocabulary. While this number may seem excessive Dr. Mary E. Dahlgren states that a beginning kindergartener should have a 6000 word vocabulary for optimum grade and class performance (Dahlgren, 2008). In the classroom a student’s vocabulary size was an effective predictor of reading comprehension. Children with a restricted or limited vocabulary also had declining comprehension scores in the third grade. The elementary teacher can promote speaking by allowing the student the opportunity to speak and by listening to the student completely. Discussing a recently read book, or open discussions are ways in which a teacher can aid a student’s speech development.

This study is a conceptualized replication of the Howes and Solomon (1951) experiment investigating word accuracy and word frequency in short duration trials. It is hypothesized that words that appear more often in printed text (easier to access in the lexicon) will be more accurately identified rather than words that appear less commonly. A total of 83 participants in the study were presented with words taken from the Throndike-Lorge database. The words were presented for one second with a six second rest in the middle. This was done sixty times and the results suggest a moderate strong relationship between word accuracy and frequency. Though there are multiple factors that may have influenced these results.

Fast mapping refers to the lexical representation of a word a child has due to one or more exposures to a word and its referent. The next step is refining the word which is done through slow mapping. Slow mapping is when children have multiple exposures to a word in a variety of contexts which allows them to refine the words meaning. This can be done in a four-state process which is described by E. Dale (1965). The first time a child hears a word is stage one (no knowledge of a word) and when a child has heard the word but they do not know the meaning of the word is stage two (emergent knowledge). When a child has an idea of what a word means because of how it is presented or because it is used in context is stage three (contextual knowledge). When a child knows what a word means, can

The study solidified the theory that social interaction is key to a toddler developing his language. This study proved that children with mothers who talk and text frequently, or disengage from their children, are less likely to learn the new words. This disengagement distracts the toddler and thus interrupts the important cognitive processes occurring in the brain to map the new words. This study was effective because of the intention and concern in its design. The researchers did an amazing job explaining the material and taking great pains to control as many

Language is a communicative system of words and symbols unique to humans. The origins of language are still a mystery as fossil remains cannot speak. However, the rudiments of language can be inferred through studying linguistic development in children and the cognitive and communicative abilities of primates as discussed by Bridgeman (2003). This essay illustrates the skills infants have that will eventually help them to acquire language. The topics covered are firstly, the biological aspects, the contribution of the human brain to language development? Secondly, key theories of language development will be considered. Is the development innate? Is there a critical period? Thirdly, what must be learned? What are the rudiments infants must

As a child develops along their journey to acquire language, they go through several steps, of which all are crucial to the successful mastering of their native tongue. There is debate over whether the period of acquisition known as babbling is the first or second stage – Berk (1991) mentions that they class babbling as the first stage, but note that there is a previous stage before that, known as the ‘cooing’ stage; following this, this essay will refer to babbling as the second stage of language acquisition. To introduce a general overview of this particular stage, Berk (1991) explains that cooing usually develops into babbling at around 6

In the first stage, called the Emergent Stage, children are able to convey his/her message by scribbling, drawing shapes, writing mock letters, and/or random strings of letters/numbers. In some cases, one letter represents an entire word or the most salient sound of a word. Some Emergent children confuse letters, numbers, and letter-like forms and substitute letters and sounds that feel and look alike (e.g., the sounds /v/ and /f/, the letters d and b)

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).