COMS 3063 quiz 7 Flashcards

Decontextualized language

True

Pragmatics

Average utterance length/syntactic complexity

Lexical productivity

Lexical diversity

Calculation of different words to total words

Recognizing the letters in their own name.

True

A child says, "I wanted the red crayon because my sister likes blue." This sentence BEST demonstrates:

Fast mapping

Deictic terms

Subordination in syntax

Weak syllable deletion

Talking about events not happening in the present

Understanding another person's perspective

Developing skills that support later reading and writing

Organizing events into a meaningful story

What Major Language-Development
Milestones Occur in the Preschool
Period?
Compared with their younger toddler counterparts, preschoolers accomplish a lot
in a day. No longer having to concentrate on keeping their footing, preschoolers
have plenty of time for building towers out of blocks (and knocking them down),
drawing and coloring, engaging in pretend play, riding bikes, and digging in the
dirt. With exposure to so many different objects and activities, preschoolers (even
those who do not attend preschool programs) have many opportunities to hear
new words, grammatical constructions, and language functions. One significant
milestone of the preschool period is the acquisition of a specific type of language
that does not rely on the immediate context for interpretation: decontextualized
language (recall that we introduced this concept, also called displacement, in
Chapter 1). Preschool-age children who are reared in literate households, or
who attend preschool are also exposed to written language and begin to acquire
important emergent literacy skills, which is probably the crowning achievement of
the preschool period.

Contextualized language is grounded
in the immediate context, or the here and now. Such language relies on the back-
ground knowledge a speaker and a listener share, and on gestures, intonation, and
immediately present situational cues. A child using contextualized language might
say “Gimme that” while pointing to something in the listener’s hands, or might de-
scribe a lion as “that big and furry one” while standing in front of the lion’s cage at
the zoo.

Decontextualized language relies heavily on the language itself in
the construction of meaning. Such language may not contain context cues and
does not assume a speaker and a listener share background knowledge or context.

Theory of Mind
In Chapter 5, we defined theory of mind (ToM) as the ability to understand one’s
own mental or emotional state, to understand that others also have mental or emo-
tional states, and to realize that others’ mental and emotional states, beliefs, inten-
tions, and perspectives differ from one’s own. In Chapter 6, we reviewed some
research illustrating the connection between ToM and language development. As
you may have guessed, the relation between language development and ToM con-
tinues throughout the preschool years and beyond, and it helps explain some of the
social and communicative challenges certain persons, such as children with autism
and Asperger’s syndrome, experience.

Emergent Literacy
During the preschool period, children develop several important literacy skills that
allow them to begin to comprehend and use written language. They learn how
print works, they begin to play with the sound units that compose syllables and
words, and they develop an interest in reading and writing.

Children’s literacy abilities depend heavily on the oral language skills they
began to acquire in infancy and toddlerhood—those skills necessary for compre-
hending language and using language expressively. For example, children need not
only well-developed phonological systems before they can make sense of graph-
eme-to-phoneme (letter-to-sound) correspondences, but also well-developed vo-
cabularies to derive meaning from text. For this reason, preschoolers are said to
“build literacy on language.”

Alphabet knowledge
is children’s knowledge about the letters of the alphabet

Print awareness is chil-
dren’s understanding of the forms and functions of written language,

phono-
logical awareness is children’s sensitivity to the sound units that make up speech
(phonemes, syllables, words).

Alphabet Knowledge
Children who grow up in households where book reading is common begin to
show emerging knowledge of the alphabet during the first 3 years of life. Some
children even know a letter or two before their second birthday. During the pre-
school years, children typically recognize some of the letters in their names, show
interest in specific letters occurring in the environment on signs or labels, and begin
to write some letters with which they are especially familiar (Chaney, 1994). By

Print Awareness
Print awareness describes a number of specific achievements children generally
acquire along a developmental continuum (Justice & Ezell, 2004): developing print
interest, recognizing print functions, understanding print conventions, understand-
ing print forms, and recognizing print part-to-whole relationships (see Figure 7.1).
First, young children develop interest in and appreciation for print. They recognize

Phonological Awareness
Phonological awareness, another important metalinguistic skill, is children’s sensitiv-
ity to the sound structure of words. This awareness emerges incrementally, beginning
at around age 2 years and moves from a “shallow” level to a “deep” level of aware-
ness (see Table 7.1; Stanovich, 2000). Children with a shallow level of phonological
awareness show an implicit and rudimentary sensitivity to large units of sound struc-
ture. They can segment sentences into words and multisyllabic words into syllables.
They can also detect and produce rhymes, combine syllable onsets with the remain-
der of the syllable to produce a word (e.g., /b/ + /It/ = bit), and detect beginning
sound similarities among words (e.g., sing, sack, sun). Children develop shallow
sensitivities during the preschool years, from about 3 to 5 years of age. In contrast,

Language Form
During the preschool years, children refine their phonology, morphology, and syn-
tax in significant ways. Preschoolers make noteworthy advances in speech produc-
tion abilities, grammatical and derivational morphology, and sentence forms.

Achievements in Speech Production
During the preschool years, children continue to refine their speech sound rep-
ertoires. By the end of the preschool period, most children have mastered nearly
all the phonemes of their native language. Four- and 5-year-old children generally
show only minimal difficulties with a few of the later-developing phonemes, includ-
ing /r/ (row), /l/ (low), /s/ (sew), /tʃ/ (cheese), /ʃ/ (show), /z/ (zoo), /θ/ (think),
and /ð/ (though). Children may also exhibit persistent difficulties with some of the
earlier-acquired phonemes when they appear in complex multisyllabic words (e.g.,
/s/ in spaghetti), or in words with consonant clusters (such as the first three sounds
in split). Despite a few ongoing challenges, preschoolers are highly intelligible and
have an adultlike expressive phonemic repertoire.

the alphabetic principle, or the relationship between letters or
combinations of letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes). Environmental and
biological factors can affect children’s development of adequate phonological rep-
resentations. For instance, children who receive little linguistic stimulation, and
those who have ongoing middle ear infections are at risk for having delays in the
development of phonological representations (Nittrouer, 1996)

Grammatical and Derivational Morphology
We introduced grammatical morphemes in Chapter 1; they are the units of meaning
we add to a word to provide additional grammatical precision, such as the plural
morpheme (bird–birds) and the verb inflection for present progressive actions (it
can fly–it is flying). Derivational morphology is similar to grammatical morphology
in that it modifies the structure of words. However, derivational morphemes are
the prefixes and suffixes we add to a word to change its meaning and sometimes
its part of speech.

Language Content
Even before children enter formal schooling, they acquire skills that ease their
transition into the academic realm and the language that accompanies this tran-
sition. For example, preschoolers continue to acquire new words at a lightning
pace—about 860 words per year—averaging about two new words per day
during this period (Biemiller, 2005). However, the strategies preschoolers use for
acquiring new words and the kinds of words they learn are different from those
in the infancy and toddler periods. We next discuss how preschoolers use fast
mapping to add words to their lexicons, use their knowledge of semantics and
syntax to infer the meanings of new words, and learn new words through shared
storybook reading. We also describe some specific types of new language con-
tent preschoolers acquire, including various types of relational terms.

Fast Mapping
Many researchers view word learning as a gradual process in which word represen-
tations progressively develop from immature, incomplete representations to mature,
accurate, and precise representations. Recall that children are able to acquire a
general representation of a new word with as little as a single exposure through
fast mapping (Carey, 1978).

slow
mapping, during which they gradually refine representations with time and mul-
tiple exposures to the word in varying contexts. In fact, children may be refining
meanings for as many as 1,600 words at any given time (Carey & Bartlett, 1978).
E. Dale (1965) described vocabulary knowledge development as a four-stage

Knowledge of Semantics and Syntax
In the preschool years, children know many vocabulary words and have a well-
developed syntax, so when they learn new words, they rely on their knowledge of
semantics and syntax to incorporate (or assimilate) the new words into their vocab-
ulary. As we discussed in Chapter 6, toddlers learning new words may overgeneral-
ize as many as one-third of word meanings on the basis of categorical, analogical,
and relational similarities.

Shared Storybook Reading
In addition to learning words through single and multiple incidental exposures,
preschoolers acquire new words as they participate in shared storybook interac-
tions with other people. The language contained within storybook readings is ex-
ceptionally rich. In fact, maternal language in storybook-reading activities contains
a more diverse array of syntax and vocabulary, and typically has a higher level of
abstraction than that in other language contexts, including play (Sorsby & Martlew,
1991).

Relational Terms
Now that we have discussed some processes by which preschoolers acquire new
words, we introduce some of the specific kinds of language content preschool-
ers acquire. One such set of words is relational terms, which are terms that allow
speakers to express logical relationships. Preschool-age children become able to
understand and use relational terms once they can grasp the concepts underlying
the terms. For example, to understand and use temporal terms, children must first
have a concept of time. Relational terms include deictic terms, interrogatives (ques-
tions), temporal terms, opposites, locational prepositions, and kinship terms.

Deictic Terms. Deictic terms are words whose use and interpretation depend on
the location of a speaker and listener within a particular setting. Examples of En-
glish deictic terms include the words here and this, which indicate proximity to the
speaker, and the words there and that, which indicate distance from the speaker.
Young children only slowly develop a mastery of these terms. The second author
saw evidence of this when her then 3-year-old daughter Addie, paddling across a
swimming pool toward her mother, happily exclaimed, “I’m almost here!”

Interrogatives. Preschoolers become increasingly adept at answering and asking
questions. They understand and use question words with more concrete applica-
tions, such as what, where, who, whose, and which before they understand and use
other interrogatives with more abstract applications, such as when, how, and why.
Preschoolers may respond inappropriately to questions they do not understand, as
in the following example of a conversation between a teacher and a preschool-age
child:

Temporal Terms. Temporal terms describe the order of events (before, after),
the duration of events (since, until), and the concurrence of events (while, during).
Preschoolers understand temporal terms describing order before they understand
temporal terms describing concurrent events. When preschoolers do not under-
stand the meaning of temporal terms, they often interpret sentences according to
word order (e.g., Weist, 2002). For example, preschoolers might interpret the sen-
tence Before you eat breakfast, take your vitamin to mean “Eat breakfast, then take
your vitamin.” Preschool-age children might also interpret temporal terms according
to their experience, so a child who takes a vitamin before breakfast each day might
interpret the preceding example correctly. Preschoolers also often use nouns that
describe time-based concepts, such as yesterday and tomorrow, with some confu-
sion, as shown by Griffin, at age 3, who once questioned: “Is it yesterday?”

Opposites. Opposites are another aspect of language content that preschoolers
learn to understand and use. Some opposite pairs that preschoolers learn include
hard–soft, big–little, heavy–light, tall–short, long–short, and large–small. Preschool-
ers learn opposites that they can perceive physically (such as big–small) before
they learn more abstract opposites (such as same–different).

Locational Prepositions. Although children begin to use some locational prep-
ositions as toddlers (e.g., in, on), they do not begin to use many other prepositions
until preschool age. Locational prepositions, which describe spatial relations, in-
clude under, next to, behind, in back of, and in front of (Grela, Rashiti, & Soares,
2004). By the end of the preschool period, most children have a solid understand-
ing of these terms.

Kinship Terms. Children initially interpret kinship terms such as mommy, daddy,
sister, and brother to refer to specific individuals. Preschoolers eventually fathom
the general meaning of these and other kinship terms, including son, daughter,
grandfather, grandmother, and parent. Children tend to learn less complex kinship
terms before more complex kinship terms, and they tend to learn kinship terms
that refer to the family member with whom they are most familiar earlier than kin-
ship terms that refer to family members with whom they are less familiar (Haviland
& Clark, 1974

Language Use
Use describes how people use language to meet personal and social needs. Pre-
school-age children implement many new discourse functions, improve their con-
versational skills, and begin to use narratives.

Discourse Functions
Recall from Chapter 6 that toddlers who are combining words can use language
to satisfy seven communicative functions: instrumental, regulatory, interactional,
personal, heuristic, imaginative, and informative. Preschoolers begin to use lan-
guage for even more complex discourse functions, including interpretive, logical,

Conversational Skills
Preschoolers begin to improve their conversational skills as they learn how to take
turns in a conversation. Most preschoolers can maintain a conversation for two or
more turns, particularly when they select the topic for discussion. Although they
still have some difficulty realizing when communication breakdowns occur and
giving listeners the appropriate amount of feedback to facilitate understanding, pre-
schoolers are becoming increasingly sophisticated conversationalists. They under-
stand they should respond to questions and discover that speaking at the same time
as another person results in ineffective communication.

Conversational Pragmatics
One area in which preschoolers begin to develop understanding is conversational
pragmatics. Grice (1975, 1989) described a principle of conversational logic that he
posited speakers and listeners should be expected to observe, namely