Linguistic Development Research Paper (Page 19 of 37) in pdf

7 THE HOLOPHRASTIC PERIOD

utterances. She is creating or providing a social frame work for the child, or is integrating the child

into a social system. This process is often known as scaﬀolding.

At the age of 0 ; 9 a new pattern of behavior appears. The baby produces strings of utterances which

have the intonations of language, even though they do not contain meaningful sounds. This period

is often called the Jargon period. By this stage the baby appears to understand what is being said

to it since it is able to obey simple instructions such as “COME here” or “STOP it!” During this

stage babies also learn another useful skill - turn taking.

Studies have shown that in the interaction between parent and child from the ages 0 ; 3 to 1 ; 6 ,

one of the main characteristics is that the interaction is of a conversational nature. The parent

alternately gives data and tries to elicit it. The pattern thus emerges of two way conversations.

Beyond 0 ; 7 this process increases when the baby starts to produce more meaningful output. By

1 ; 0 mother and child have a repertoire of shared activities which can last for several minutes. When

in this stage the mother will begin to expand and rephrase the babble that the baby produces as if

they were words.

From around 1 ; 0 babies begin to use words consistently to refer to things that they want, or to name

people or objects. At this time they often condense the meaning of words so that they mean diﬀerent

things in diﬀerent social of psychological states. They are able to create variations in the meaning

of the word by intonation, context, gesture and volume to produce a richer form of expression. For

this reason the single words are often known as holophrases because they are used to represent a

whole idea.

The Holophrastic Period

The word “Holophrastic” is used to mean the single word phrase stage. It starts at around the

age 1 ; 0 and ends at about 1 ; 6 . As its name suggests the only verbal means that the baby has

of communicating is through the use of single word sentences. These words are not as basic as the

meaning of just that single word. The child is able to imbue the word with a set of other meanings

which are expressed using intonation patterns and gestures as well as volume. It is the fact that the

child is able to express more than one meaning with a single word, that the linguists say that the

words are holo-phrases.

At the age around 1 ; 6 the child’s vocabulary begins to grow at a phenomenal rate. The words are

accumulated at a rate of around 15 words per day for around the next 15 years!!(See [SC91] and

[Pin94]). This rate and duration may seem preposterous, but the latest estimates for the size of

our vocabularies is vastly larger than was originally thought. Indeed, given that we learn generative

morphological rules as part of our linguistic development, we have the capacity to use an inﬁnitely

large set of words in our language.

Pronunciation improves during the Holophrastic stage and the vocabulary consists of a large pro-

portion of person and object words. There are some relational words but they do not form a large

part of the language of a child until the telegraphic period. The kinds of relational words which are

used are normally like ’up’, ’no’, or ’more’.

It seems from much research that has been done recently in the computer modeling of language

development that there is a critical mass of knowledge that the child must accumulate before he

can start to make connections between the items of knowledge. Hence the vocabulary must be of a

certain size and consistency before the syntactic development of the telegraphic stage can commence.

Likewise the the increased comprehension that the child has of adult speech means that he can start

to deduce many more facts about the content of sentences and the meanings of words.

Linguistic Development Research Paper Page 19

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