Adolescence language development

Question 1

What occurs during adolescent vocabulary development?

Answer 1

Awareness of multiple meaning increases
Polysemous words common when teaching special, musical and mathematical concepts
Increased knowledge of connections between words
Improved storage and retrieval of words and thus word finding skills - response time decreases with age

Question 2

What kinds of words are learnt by adolescents?

Answer 2

Precise and technical terms
Adverbs of likelihood and magnitude
Advanced adverbial conjuncts - aid intersentential growth
Factive verbs: presuppose truth
Nonfactive verbs: suggest uncertainty
Metalinguistic and metacognitive verbs such as: assert, concede, infer, remember and doubt

Question 3

What occurs during adolescent syntactic development?

Answer 3

Increasing frequency of complex structures
Written takes over spoken syntax at 12
Vary word order more

Question 4

What is intrasentential growth?

Answer 4

Length of sentences increases and in specific linguistic contexts

Question 5

What is intersentential growth?

Answer 5

Cohesion across sentences, adverbial conjuncts used in writing and conversation

Question 6

What occurs between 13 and 18 years in terms of conversation?

Answer 6

Questioning increased with age and vocalised pauses reduce
Number of interruptions increase
Fewer abrupt topic shifts
Language used to entertain more sophisticated
Language used to indicate readiness for further communication
Intonation: use of subtle patterns completed

Question 7

What are the sociolinguistic patterns in adolescence?

Answer 7

Need to be learned for children to develop true ‘communicative competence’
Patterns appropriate for different characteristics - appropriate language use in different situations
Peer group takes over from family for socialisation

Question 8

What are the 3 modes of learning in adolescence?

Answer 8

Direct instruction
Contextual abstraction
Morphological analysis