Abstract
The present work re-evaluates the long-standing claim that demonstratives are among infants’ earliest and most common words. Although demonstratives are deictic words important for joint attention, deictic gestures and non-word vocalizations could serve this function in early language development; the role of demonstratives may have been overestimated. Using extensive data from the CHILDES corpora (Study 1, N = 66, 265 transcripts) and McArthur-Bates CDI database (Study 2, N = 950), the language production of 18- to 24-month-old Spanish- and English-speaking children was analyzed to determine the age and order of acquisition, and frequency of demonstratives. Results indicate that demonstratives do not typically appear before the 50th word and only become frequent from the two-word utterance stage. Corpus data show few differences between Spanish and English, whereas parental report data suggest much later acquisition for demonstratives in English. These findings expand our knowledge of the foundations of deictic communication, and of the methodological challenges of assessing early production of function words.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
Caselli et al (1995) described the language acquisition of English and Italian speakers based on parental report with the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) on over 800 children, and did not find any demonstratives among the 50 words first produced in either language
Conclusions of Study 1 (CHILDES Data) Analysis of the spontaneous speech of 18 to 24 month old English and Spanish speaking children revealed that demonstratives are used by more than half of children from age 18 months, and at the single-word utterance stage
Summary
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Caselli et al (1995) described the language acquisition of English and Italian speakers based on parental report with the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) on over 800 children, and did not find any demonstratives among the 50 words first produced in either language. These data are striking but inconclusive, since the sensitivity of parental report to detect function words in child vocabulary is as yet unclear (Salerni et al, 2007). In line with this, Capirci et al (1996) found a small proportion of deictic words in 16- and 20-monthold Italian infants, and a greater proportion of deictic gestures (in combination or not with a content word)
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