Chapter 10: Early School-Age Language Development

Question 1

Identify what is FALSE about the early school-age child

• has a solid sense of self
• has a good sense of time and understands words such as, yesterday or today
• no longer believes in magic as an explanation for much that happens
• is able to use language to converse to entertain, tell stories, and discuss emotions

Answer 1

-has solid sense of self = True

-has a good sense of time and understands words such as, yesterday or today = True

• no longer believes in magic as an explanation for much that happens = False
• is able to use language to converse to entertain, tell stories, and discuss emotion = True

Question 2

TRUE or FALSE

Peer socialization creates a less egocentric perspective and Theory of Mind continues to develop

Answer 2

TRUE

-a school-age child is a highly social being, and same gender peers become very important

-as Theory of Mind begins to develop, a child begins to realize that his or her own reality is not the only one

Question 3

TRUE or False

A first grader has an expressive vocabulary of approximately 2,600 words but can understand as many as 8,000-10,000 root English words

Answer 3

TRUE

• when aided by school, the child’s receptive vocabulary expands to an understanding of approximately 50,000 words by sixth grade
• multiple word meanings are also acquired

Question 4

TRUE or FALSE

The school years are a period of stabilization of rules previously learned and the addition of new rules

Answer 4

TRUE

-since language growth slows down for school-age children, time compensates for the systematic development and stabilization of word-formation and sentence-structuring rules

Question 5

TRUE or FALSE

The area of LEAST linguistic growth during the school-age years is language use, or pragmatics

Answer 5

FALSE

• Pragmatics is the area of MOST linguistic growth during the school-age years
• It is in pragmatics that we see the interaction of language and socialization

Question 6

TRUE or FALSE

Environment is responsible for the stability of some conversational measures, such as MLU and total number of words, between first and second grade

Answer 6

FALSE

• Genetic effects account for half of the variance in young school-age children’s conversational language skills which results in the stability of some conversational measures, like MLU (based on twin studies)
• Environmental effects seem less stable across time

Question 7

Identify which of the following is TRUE about the changes in language use a child experiences due to classroom demands

• A child must negotiate a turn by seeking recognition from the teacher and responding in a highly specific manner to questions
• “Text related” or ideational language becomes relatively more important than social, interpersonal language
• A child is held highly accountable for responses and is required to use precise word meanings
• A child who comes to school with different language skills and expectations may suffer as a consequence

Answer 7

All of the following are TRUE

• A child must negotiate a turn by seeking recognition from the teacher and responding in a highly specific manner to questions
• “Text related” or ideational language becomes relatively more important than social, interpersonal language
• A child is held highly accountable for responses and is required to use precise word meanings
• A child who comes to school with different language skills and expectations may suffer as a consequence

Question 8

TRUE or FALSE

Narratives help children maintain a positive self-image and a group identification within their families and communities.

Answer 8

TRUE

• Narratives reflect the storyteller’s experience
• The scripts formed by experiences are the foundations for narratives
• The ability to relate well-formed narratives affects the judgements others make about the speaker’s communicative competence which in turn help children maintain a positive self-image and a group identification with their families and communities

Question 9

TRUE or FALSE

70% of narratives produced by 5 and 6 year olds are called fantasy stories

Answer 9

FALSE

• Anecdotal narratives of a personal nature predominate, possibly accounting for as many as 70% of all narratives at this age
• Fantasy stories are relatively rare

Question 10

Determine which of the following is FALSE

A. Children learn about narratives within their homes and their language communities

B. Emerging narratives reflect different cultures

C. Every society allows children to hear and produce at least 4 basic narrative types

D. The distribution, frequency, and degree of elaboration of these narrative types are the same for every child

Answer 10

D is FALSE

• The distribution, frequency, and degree of elaboration of these narrative types vary greatly
• 4 narrative types:
• 1. Recount
• 2. Eventcast
• 3. Accounts
• 4. Stories

Question 11

TRUE or FALSE

• By the time most children in the United States begin school, they are familiar with all FOUR forms of narration and children are expected to use these forms in the classroom causing difficulty for children of different cultures

Answer 11

TRUE, this expectation may be unrealistic for some children as the narratives encouraged in some cultures can vary

• Chinese American children are encouraged to give accounts within their families but not outside the immediate household
• In some white low-SES Southern communities, children’s recounts are tightly controlled by the interrogator and children are not encouraged to tell stories
• Southern African American low-SES children produce mostly accounts or eventcasts and have minimal experience with recounts

Question 12

TRUE or FALSE

Generally by age 6, children’s narratives gain causal coherence, which involves descriptions of intentions, emotions, and thoughts and the use of connectives (because, as a result of), allowing the speaker to go back and forward in time

Answer 12

TRUE, the preschooler has much difficulty going back and forward in time and are unable to construct coherent causal narratives

Question 13

Identify which of the following is TRUE about mature narratives:

A. The center of the story is non-existant

B. The story is incohesive, random, and the theme changes constantly

C. Causal relationships move toward the ending of the initial situation called the climax

D. Mature narratives only consist of a single episode and nothing more

Answer 13

C is TRUE, In mature narratives:

A. The center develops as the story progresses

B. Each incident complements the center, follows from previous incidents, forms a chain, and adds some new aspect to the theme

C. Causal relationships move toward the ending of the initial situation called the climax

D. May consist of a single episode, or of several episodes, which contain(s) a statement of the problem or challenge, and all elements of the plot are directed toward a solution

Question 14

Which of the following are TRUE about the stories of school-age children?

A. A child uses beginning and ending markers in fictional narratives, such as “once upon a time” or “lived happily ever after”

B. Story length increases and becomes more complex with the aid of syntactic devices (conjuntions, locatives, comparatives, etc.)

C. Characters tend to remain constant throughout the narrative even if the story is about a disquieting event

D. The presentation relies largely on language rather than on the child’s accompanying use of actions and like a good storyteller, a child manipulates the text and audience to maintain attention

Answer 14

A, B, C, and D are TRUE

Question 15

Determine which of the following is FALSE about the characteristics of older children’s narratives

A. Fewer unresolved problems and unprepared resolutions

B. Less introduction along with vague explanation of setting and character information

C. More complex episodic structure

D. Closer adherence to the story grammar model

Answer 15

B is FALSE, here are other True characteristics of older children’s narratives

B. More introduction, including setting and character information

• Less extranous detail
• More overt making of changes in time and place
• Greater concern for motavation and internal reactions

Question 16

TRUE or FALSE

The narratives of children in the United States reflect cultural differences

Answer 16

TRUE

• Linguistic differences will account for differing methods of introducing new elements, referring to old information, and providing cohesion
• We find that narratives become increasingly more complex and more coherent in all languages
• More characters and dialog and multiple and complex episodes are used
• Across languages, the number of characters varies with the style and puropose of the narrative

Question 17

TRUE or FALSE

The most successful school-age communicators use questions to probe before introducing a possibly unfamiliar topic

Answer 17

TRUE

• more successful communicators use more questions and have more answered than do the least successful
• regardless of age, more successful school-age communicators are quick to recognize communication breakdown and to offer further explanation or to repair

Question 18

Identify which of the following is FALSE about indirect requests

A. The proportion of indirect to direct requests decreases between ages 3 and 5

B. In general, the 5-year-old is successful at directly asking, commanding, and forbidding.

C. By age 7, the child has acquired greater facility with indirect forms

D. Flexibility in indirect request forms inceases with age

Answer 18

A is FALSE

- The proportion of indirect to direct requests increases between ages 3 and 5

• Indirect requests are first produced in the preschool years so proficiency in understanding and creating them increases over time.
• ex: “The sun sure is a scorcher today”

Question 19

TRUE or FALSE

As a child matures, comprehension of most types of indirect request increases.

Answer 19

TRUE

• Interrogative forms, such as “shouldn’t you?” are more difficult than Declarative forms, such as “you shouldn’t”
• Negative forms, such as “please don’t” are more difficult for 4 to 7-year-olds to interpret than positive forms, such as “please do”
• Polarity is a strong factor, especially when it differs from the literal meaning
• These levels of relative difficulty change little from childhood to adulthood and reflect the same comprehension difficulties experienced by adults

Question 20

TRUE or FALSE

The real change in Semantic development comes in interrelated semantic concepts, semantic classes, synonyms, homonyms, and antonyms

Answer 20

TRUE

• all of these are part of a child’s understanding of a word
• semantic knowledge grows as the school-age child is exposed to these aspects of a word

Question 21

Which of the following are affect the variance in semantic development.

A. Education level

B. Socioeconomic status

C. Gender

D. Age

E. Cultural Background

Answer 21

All options affect semantic development

• Middle-SES urban and suburban youngsters have more complete definitions than low-SES rural children
• Definitional skill is highly correlated with involvement in an academic culture, which as a result, some low-SES fourth graders outperform their parents in providing oral definitions

Question 22

TRUE or FALSE

During school-age and adult years, there is only one type of increase in word meaning

Answer 22

FALSE, there are two types of increases in word meanings

• 1. A child slow maps word definitions beyond the functional and physical properties that are core aspects of the definitions of children as old as 5
• slow map: a child adds features to the definition that are common to the adult definition of a word
• 2. A child brings together all the definitions that can fit a single word
• ex: Michelle (11yrs): “Well, when I have children, I hope they don’t get any of your genes.”

Katie (7yrs): (after a long pause) “No, and they won’t get any of my sneakers, either.”

Question 23

TRUE or FALSE

A child’s ability to define words may progress in TWO ways during the early school years

Answer 23

TRUE

• 1. A child progresses conceptually from definitions based on individual experience to more socially shared meaning
• 2. He/She moves syntactically from single word action definitions to sentences expressing complex relationships
• This shift in form occurs around second grade; similar shifts in definition content occur throughout grade school
• Supplying precise semantic content seems to develop prior to using correct syntactic form to provide a definition

Question 24

TRUE or FALSE

There are several factors that affect vocabulary acquisition

Answer 24

TRUE

• 1. Both children and adults use a strategy of “chunking” semantically related information into categories for remembering
• therefore, 7th graders rely more on chunking for recall than do 1st graders
• 2. The use of semantic relations resolves word ambiguities
• ex: there, their, and they’re sound quite similar and could be confused, except for the very different semantic relations they represent
• 3. Categorical structures are stored hierarchically, seen in a progression from Fido to dog to pet to animal.
• 4. Facilitative neural networks connect related word-concept structures, thus new vocabulary acquisitions are associated with previous knowledge

Question 25

**TRUE** or **FALSE** Children may begin to employ the following sequence of processing strategies that adults use: 1. Segment the message into the underlying sentences 2. Mark the relations between the underlying sentences 3. Determine the semantic relations of the lexical items 4. Determine the semantic probabilites of co-occurence 5. Label the functions and properties of specific lexical items

Answer 25

**TRUE** ## Footnote - - There is a shift in a child's linguistic processing from reliance on surface (syntactic rules and phonetic strings) to reliance on deep (semantic categories and relations) strategies during the early school years - This shift may mirror gradually decreasing cognitive reliance on visual input for memory and recall, a gradual change from visual encoding by preschoolers to overt naming as the dominant memory process of school-age children

Question 26

**TRUE** or **FALSE** ## Footnote **The use of *figurative language* is indicative of lower language functions which correlates to the decrease in adolescent literacy skills**

Answer 26

**FALSE** ## Footnote - figurative language is indicative of higher language functions and correlates with adolescent literacy skills - conversation, classroom teaching, and reading use figurative expressions frequently

Question 27

Determine which of the following *does not* affect the development of individual figurative expressions. ## Footnote - A. World knowledge - B. Learning context - C. Why it's the arrow and not the Indian - D. Metaphoric transparency

Answer 27

C *does not* affect the development of individual figurative expressions ## Footnote - A. World Knowledge is related to a general ability to interpret figurative expressions - B. Learning context of a figurative expression may be stored as a large single lexical item, rather than as individual words within the expression - With single words, the meanings of figurative expressions are inferred from repeated exposure to these expressions in different contexts - D. Metaphoric transparency of a figurative expression is an analytical task in which a child must actively think about the meaning of the expression in context and perceive the metaphoric comparisons

Question 28

**TRUE** or **FALSE** Language development consists of simultaneous expansion of existing syntactic forms and acquisition of new forms

Answer 28

**TRUE** ## Footnote **-** A child continues with internal sentence expansion by elaborating the noun and verb phrases - Conjoining and embedding functions also expand - Additional structures include the passive sentence form - During the school-age years, adolescence, and early adulthood, syntactic development is characterized by gradual increases in the length and complexity of utterances produced in spoken and written communication

Question 29

**TRUE** or **FALSE** By age 8 a child still cannot produce all English speech sounds competently

Answer 29

**FALSE** ## Footnote **-** By age 8, a child *can* produce all English speech sounds competently - During the early school years, a child completes the phonetic inventory - Sounds in longer words or blends may still be difficult , the acquisition of sounds, however, is only one aspect of a child's phonological competence

Question 30

**TRUE** or **FALSE** In order to increase sentence length and complexity a child requires increased speech motor planning.

Answer 30

**TRUE** ## Footnote - Around age 9, children begin to use adultlike prespeech processes to plan the timing of sentence phrases - Although younger children vary considerably in their movement, such as lip rounding, to produce sounds, these movements may affect and extend across an entire utterance - For both young children and adults, broad chunks of speech have been planned by the time they initiate production of a sentence

Question 31

**TRUE** or **FALSE** ## Footnote **Full metalinguistic awareness is not achieved until age 7-8 years**

Answer 31

**TRUE** ## Footnote - Prior to this age children view language primarily as a means of communication and do not focus on the manner in which it is conveyed - After this age, the development of decentration enables a child to concentrate on and process simultaneously two aspects of language; *message meaning* and *linguistic correctness* * -* A child is able to judge grammatical correctness without being influenced by semantics

Question 32

Identify which is **FALSE** about the developmental order of mastery of grammatical structures in judgement tasks. ## Footnote - A. Simple word order changes - B. The present progressive morpheme - C. Omitted determiners and auxiliaries - D. Agreement errors (especially third person singular subject-verb agreement and plural agreement) - E. Regular forms

Answer 32

D is **FALSE** ## Footnote - D. Irregular forms

Question 33

**TRUE** or **FALSE** Working memory increases throughout the elementary school years but is not significantly correlated among 3rd graders with both grammaticality judgement and the ability to correct ungrammatical sentences

Answer 33

**FALSE** ## Footnote - As working memory increases throughout the elementary school years it *IS* significantly correlated among 3rd graders with both grammaticality judgement and the ability to correct ungrammatical sentences - Working memory is also correlated with receptive syntax ability and sentence comprehension in young elementary school children

Question 34

**TRUE** or **FALSE** Metalinguistic abilities do not depend on development of all aspects of language

Answer 34

**FALSE** ## Footnote - Like emerging pragmatic skills, metalinguistic abilities depend on development of all aspects of language - With increased structural and semantic skills, a child is finally able to attend to how a message is communicated without having to actively think about the linguistic context of what is being communicated - Metalinguistic skill development is related to language use, cognitive development, reading ability, academic achievement, IQ, environmental stimulation, and play

Question 35

**TRUE** or **FALSE** ## Footnote **Children who learned two languages simultaneously will experience difficulty by school age**

Answer 35

**FALSE** ## Footnote - Children who learned two languages simultaneously should experience no difficulty by school age and may actually be at an advantage in school - Children who are learning English successive to a first language may experience some difficulty in school depending on when they began to learn English

Question 36

**Determine which is FALSE about the following, with regards to code switching in children** ## Footnote **- A. Children begin by code switching single words from one language to another** **- B. Systematic code switching appears to be a function of the participants in a conversation** **- C. In general, children under age 5 combine proficiency and preference decisions** **- D. Children often increase code switching when with their peers compared to their parents or other adults.**

Answer 36

D is **FALSE** ## Footnote - I made D up - Certain words and phrases tend to be switched predictably across different conversations by the same speaker. Individuals vary based on language proficiency - There are 3 characteristics of the participants in a conversation that are important: their perceived language proficiency, their language preference, and their social identity - Older children make finer distinctions which allow them to consider their speaker more often; they show increased presuppositional skills, identify certain people with certain languages, and also use physical characteristics as a guide

Question 37

**TRUE** or **FALSE** ## Footnote **There are other functional variables that influence code switching**

Answer 37

**TRUE** - There are other functional variables that influence code switching such as: * type of discourse is a factor * physical setting alone has little influence * interviews and narratives contain few switches, instead remaining in one language or the other * conversations are characterized by frequent switches

Question 38

**TRUE** or **FALSE** For an individual child, the main effects of African American English (AAE) are *social* and *educational*

Answer 38

**TRUE** * AAE is stigmatized within our multidialectical society, a child may also be stigmatized * The attachment of these relative values can result in stereotypes which affect other judgements * These judgements can result in denial of *employment* and *educational opportunities* * In general, AAE speakers are granted shorter employment interviews, offered fewer postitions, and offered lower-paying positions compared to speakers of more "typical" dialects

Question 39

Which of the following are **FALSE** about educator bias based on speakers of AAE * Lack of verbal capacity in formal or threatening situations * poor school performance is a result of this verbal deficit * Middle-class speech habits result in better school achievement * Dialectal differences reflect differences in the capacity for logical analysis

Answer 39

All of these are **TRUE** about educator bias based on speakers of AAE as well as: * Logical thinking can be fostered by teaching children to mimic the formal speech patterns of their teachers * Children who adopt these formal patterns think logically and thus do better in reading and arithmetic

Question 40

**TRUE** or **FALSE** Speakers of AAE do not have difficulty with reading and spelling

Answer 40

**FALSE** * Speakers of AAE will have difficulty with reading and spelling * In general, children read orally in accordance with their dialects, this results in *phonemic differences* * These phonemic differences can cause the teacher difficulty in interpreting the child's oral reading, along with surface phonemic differences in the child's spelling