Language Development Through Preschool Years (2 - 4 years)
Language Development Through Preschool Years (2 - 4 years)
What Develops?
Stage Two: Elaborating and Refining Meaning {27-30 mos.; MLU 2.0-2.5}
- 163 * {intro}
- 163.1 * Roger Brown's "modulations of meaning" by use of grammatical morphemes
- 164.2 order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes
- 165.1 adults often use media and data as singular {also problem with criterion and criteria}
- 165.2 overextensions and overgeneralizations occur but are quite rare (5%)
- 165 Pronouns: Words Used to Represent Nouns
- 166.3-167.1 subjective then objective then possessive then reflexive pronouns
- {no mention that meaning of "I," "you," and "he" depends on speaker and listener and that parents often don't use pronouns but instead use their own name ("Mommy is here, don't cry"); Nana still does this.
- 169 Producing Sentences to Say "NO!!"
- 169.3 sequence of negation
- "no kick that"
- "I no like that"
- "Daddy is not going to work"
- 170.2 Bloom's three meanings of negation for Stage 2 child
- nonexistence ("Cookie all gone")
- rejection ("No nite-nite")
- denial ("No doggie" = that is not a doggie)
- 170.3 uses "can't" and "don't" but not "can" and "do"
- 172 Semantic Development in Stage Two
- 172.4 between 18 mos. and 6 years child learns average of 6 words/day (Cary, 1978)
- 173.1 6 year old has comprehension vocabulary of 6,000 words
- 173.2 * fast mapping: use of context to guess meanings of words; partial understandings of words
- 98/02/25 note that for young child, context must be at least partly extralinguistic; as language competence develops a purely linguistic context can be useful
- 98/02/25 I cannot initially learn a foreign-language via telephone, but after I have a base, I can continue to develop my knowledge of the language via telephone (as could child learning a first language)
- 174.2 understanding of causation
- 175 Pragmatics: Small Steps Toward Conversational Competence
- 175.2 use of please depending on context
- more likely of listener is "older, more dominant, and less familiar, or if his listener has something he realy wants (Ervin-Tripp & Gordon, 1986)"
- 175.3 child 24-36 mos. "beginning to create understandable topics"
- 176.2+ **@ conversational repair
- change speech sound
- delete a word
- change a word
- 177.2+ "even though children consistently respond to requests for clarification from their listeners, they make few requests for repairs when they listen to adult speakers (Gallagher, 1981)."
Stage Three: Producing Longer, More Adult-Like Sentences {31-34; MLU 2.5-3.0}
- 180 Pragmatic Development: Slow Progress in the Art of Conversation
- 180.3 topic collaboration
- 181.2 "the child's presuppostional skills remain relatively undeveloped. As long as the topic is immediately present, the adult will know the child's conversational {182.1} focus, but the child often usees pronouns when their referents are not identifiable and he provides little assistance to his listener except for supplying some details about the topic which might enhance understanding (Owens, 1996, p. 275).
Stage Four: Elaboration by Embedding {35-40 mos.; MLU 3.0-3.75}
- 187 Pragmatic Development: Becoming a Better Conversationalist
- 187.2 child learns that pauses greater than 1 second mean partner not likely to respond
- 188.1 **? child more likely to maintain topic if related to immediate environment or something that interests him
- ? what are implications of this for developing conversational competence, to get children to "distance" their conversations? (talk about things of interest, preferably common activities that have taken place or that will take place)
- 188.2 child begins to understand what listener needs to know
- 188.2 * child adjusts amount of information available depending on context, age of listener
- 98/02/24 child continues to gain control of his evironment
- 189.2 * indirect requests
- 189.4 child begins to make indirect requests ("Can you give me a cooke?")
Stage Five: Polishing the Act {41-46 mos.; MLU 3.75-4.5}
- 191 Morphemic Development: The Acquisition Continues
- 191.3+ child learns irregular past tenses
- 191.3 overextension of regular forms
- 197 Pragmatic Development: The Conversational Fine Tuning Continues
- 197.4 child uses pauses as cue for initiating turn
- 198.1 may complete partner's thought
- 198.2 some pre-schoolers can handle 2-party conversations, but have trouble with 3-party
- 199.1 polite verbal strategies not used
- 199.2 "Even when a child is in the early elementary school years, he seldom adds significant information to a conversation (Brinton & Fujiki, 1984). In this sense, he remains a conversational follower."
- 199.3 still responds more to requests for repairs than makes request himself
- 200.3 more indirect requests
- 201 Pragmatic Development: The Beginnings of Narrative Discourse
- 201.1 child must learn to tell a story
- 201.3 protonarratives at 3 1/2 years
- 201.4 chaining (sequential)
- 201.4 centering (parts of narrative related to central theme)
- 202.1 child produces own stories between 2 and 3 years (Sutton-Smith, 1986)
- 202.3 heap
- 203+ development of narrative
- going nowhere
- related thematically but not temporally (or causally)
- related both thematically and temporally (or causally)
Understanding Language: Cognition, Comprehension, and Production
- 206 Understanding Active or Passive Sentences
- 206.3 child does not understand reversible passives until beyond Stage 5
- what does this indicate about his general strategy for understanding language?
- figure out what makes sense; then later pay more attention to grammatical cues to override common sense ones (as in "The chair ate the dog")
- later child can use language create possible and even impossible worlds; becomes an important tool for thought
- 207 Word Order: Which Comes First, Comprehension or Production?
- 207.3 Chapman & Miller (1975) showed pre-school children better a producing proper word order than understanding it
- 208 Words Expressing Relations: From Concepts to Production
- 208.2 relational words
- 208.3 spatial
- 208.4 temporal
- 209.2 quantity
- 209.3 dimensional
Why Does It Develop?
- Language as better and better control of social and physical environment?
- Consider small group discussions of whether all language is an attempt to control the environment; and what would happen if every desire of a child was instantly granted, would he learn language? partly? (No language?, some language?, normal language?)
- Story about child who never said anything until he was seven years old and then one day sais "The soup's cold." When asked why he had never said anything up 'till then he said that everything had been fine up to that point.
How Does it Develop?
- genetic maturation?
- creative variation and selection (based on interaction with others)?
Computer Activity in Pairs
- view video clips of children from 2 to 4 years and classify children according to Stages 2 through 5 as described in Chapter 5 of Hulit & Howard
- Compass > Class Activities > 2. Video Clips: 2 to 4 years