Child Development

produced far more manual babbling than three
matched hearing infants at similar ages. The deaf in-
fants’ hand babbling also revealed phonetic features
of American Sign Language, suggesting that babbling
reflects infants’ innate ability to analyze phonetic and
syllabic components of linguistic input.

Pre-Speech Productions and First Words

or Signs

Early words are produced by the child in expect-
ed contexts, and hence are recognized by familiar lis-
teners as linguistic units conveying meanings. In 1999
Esther Dromi distinguished between comprehensible
and meaningful words. Comprehensible words are
phonetically consistent forms resembling adult words
that caregivers understand, but that do not yet convey
referential meanings. Meaningful words are symbol-
ic, arbitrary, and agreed-upon terms of reference.
Considerable variation exists in both the age of
speech onset and the rate of early lexical develop-
ment. Large-scale questionnaire data reported in
1994 by Fenson and his colleagues for English-
speaking typically developing children, cited the
range of vocabulary size for twelve- to thirteen-
month-olds at 0 to 67 different words, and for eigh-
teen- to nineteen-month-olds at 13 to 471 different
words. In 2000 Maital and her colleagues reported
very similar figures for Hebrew.

Early words are constructed from a limited set of
consonants, mainly stops, nasals, and glides. Syllable
structures in these words are usually CV, CVC, or
CVCV. Several researchers found that during the first
few months of lexical learning, many new words are
composed from segments that the child is already
using in babbling. A number of researchers have pro-
posed that patterns of lexical selection and avoidance
reflect the child’s production capabilities. When pro-
ductive vocabularies contain more than a hundred
different words, the influences of phonology on the
lexicon decline. Nevertheless, children who have rela-
tively larger lexicons of single words also show larger
inventories of sounds and syllable structures than
children with smaller productive lexicons. Precocious
word learners have much larger phonetic inventories
than typically developing children at age eighteen
months. The major semantic achievement in the first
few months of vocabulary learning is the ability to use
words referentially. Martyn Barrett and Esther
Dromi, who independently carried out detailed longi-
tudinal analyses of repeated uses of the same words
over time, have argued that some early words show
referential use from their outset, while other words
are initially produced only in very specific contexts.
Throughout the one-word stage, the phonology of
words improves, and meanings become symbolic and

arbitrary. A word initially produced in just one situa-

tion is now uttered in a much wider range of contexts,

until it becomes completely context free and referen-

tial. As words become conventional tools for express-

ing meanings, the amount of pre-speech vocalizations

declines and gradually disappears.

See also: INFANCY; LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

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BANDURA, ALBERT (1925–)

Albert Bandura, who proposed the most comprehen-

sive and widely held theory of modeling, was born in

BANDURA, ALBERT 47