Chapter 7 Flashcards
preschool period
2 years before a child enters elementary school, or between about ages 3 and 5 years.
- acquire new words at a lightning pace—about 860 words per year—averaging about two new words per day during this 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.
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 progression
- children demonstrate sensitivity to diverse desires
- demonstrate sensitivity to diverse beliefs,
- show sensitivity to knowledge access,
- understand false belief
- understand hidden emotion
- children understand sarcasm
Sentential complements
structures that represent a person’s speech or mental state. They contain a main clause with a verb of communication or a mental state verb and an embedded clause that may or may not be true.
emergent literacy
earliest period of learning about reading and writing
metalinguistic ability
the ability to view language as an object of attention.
- an important achievement of the preschool period that correlates well with children’s success with writing and reading instruction, both of which depend on the ability to focus on language as an object of attention
Three important achievements in emergent literacy for preschoolers are
alphabet knowledge, print awareness, and phonological awareness.
Alphabet knowledge
is children’s knowledge about the letters of the alphabet.
- children who grew-up reading know letters in the 1st 3 years of their life
- by age 5 they know letters in their name (own name advantage) 79% of them
Print awareness
is children’s understanding of the forms and functions of written language
- print interest
- recognition of print functions
- understanding print conventions (left to right/ top to bottom)
- understanding print forms (learn words and letters)
- recognizing print to part to whole relationships (how letters combine to make words)
- when reading to themselves only loook @ book 5-6% of time
- when ADULTS read looks they 12.5 times when an adult read the book verbatim, 17.7 times when an adult made nonverbal references to print, and 21.2 times when an adult made verbal references to print.
phonological awareness
is children’s sensitivity to the sound units that make up speech
- beginning at around age 2 years
Own-name advantage:
Children learn the letters of their names earlier than other letters.
Letter-name pronunciation effect:
Children learn alphabet letters with the name of the letter in its pronunciation earlier than letters for which this is not the case
Letter-order hypothesis:
Children learn letters occurring earlier in the alpha-bet string (e.g., A, B, C) before letters occurring later in the alphabet string (e.g., X, Y, Z).
Consonant-order hypothesis:
Children learn letters for which correspond-ing consonantal phonemes are learned early in development (e.g., B, M) be-fore letters for which corresponding consonantal phonemes are learned later (e.g., J, V).
shallow level of phonological awareness
show an implicit and rudimentary sensitivity to large units of sound structure.
- word awareness
- syllable awareness
- rhyme awareness
- onset awareness
- phoneme identity
- developed form 3- 5 years of age
deep level of phonological awareness
demonstrate an explicit and analytical knowledge of the smallest phonological segments of speech
- phoneme blending
- phoneme segmentation
- phoneme counting
- phoneme manipulation
phonological processes
systematic errors children make in their speech
- in the age 3–4 period, children have the fastest suppression rate
Two patterns that may persist past the fifth birthday are as follows:
- Liquid gliding: When a liquid consonant (/r/ or /l/) is replaced by a glide consonant (/w/ or /j/— the first sound in yellow)
- Stopping: When a fricative (such as /θ/—the “th” sound in think— or /ð/—the “th” sound in though) or an affricate (such as the first sound in jeep) is replaced by a stop consonant (such as /t/ or /d/)
alphabetic principle
the relationship between letters or combinations of letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes).
Derivational morphology
the prefixes and suffixes we add to a word to change its meaning and sometimes its part of speech.
Frequent occurrence in utterance-final position:
Infants and children are most sensitive to sounds and words at the ends of utterances. Children first learn morphemes occurring as suffixes.
Syllabicity:
Children first learn morphemes that constitute their own syllables (e.g., present progressive -ing) and later learn morphemes that contain only a single sound (e.g., third-person singular -s).
Single relation between morpheme and meaning:
Children first learn mor-phemes with only one meaning (e.g., the morpheme the functions only as a definite article) before they learn morphemes that express multiple meanings (e.g., -s denotes present tense, third person, and plural number).
Consistency in use:
Children learn the names of morphemes that are used con-sistently (e.g., possessive nouns always end in ’s) more easily than morphemes that vary in their use
Allomorphic variation:
Children learn morphemes that have a consistent pro-nunciation (e.g., -ing) before they learn morphemes that have allomorphic vari-ation (e.g., the plural morpheme has three variations: /s/, /z/, and /Iz/).
Clear semantic function:
Children first learn morphemes that have a clear meaning (e.g., plural morpheme) before they learn morphemes with less clear meaning
verb morphology
- ## The most significant area of morpheme development in the preschool period
Subject–verb–object–adverb:
“Daddy’s hitting the hammer outside.
Subject–verb–complement–adverb:
“Daddy is hungry now.”
Subject–auxiliary–verb–adverb:
“Daddy is eating now.”
slow mapping
during which they gradually refine representations with time and multiple exposures to the word in varying contexts.
- children may be refining meanings for as many as 1,600 words at any given time
vocabulary knowledge development as a four-stage process:
stage 1: No knowledge of a word
Stage 2: Emergent knowledge
Stage 3: Contextual knowledge
Stage 4: Full knowledge
extended mapping
a full and complete under-standing of the meaning of a word.
novel name–nameless category (N3C)
match novel labels to nameless objects and can then fast map novel words through this process.
Shared Storybook Reading
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
relational terms
which are terms that allow speakers to express logical relationships.
Deictic Terms
are words whose use and interpretation depend on the location of a speaker and listener within a particular setting.
- this, here, there, that
Interrogatives
They understand and use question words with more concrete applications, 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.
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.
Opposites
Some opposite pairs that preschoolers learn include hard–soft, big–little, heavy–light, tall–short, long–short, and large–small. Preschoolers learn opposites that they can perceive physically (such as big–small) before they learn more abstract opposites (such as same–different).
Locational Prepositions
which describe spatial relations, in-clude under, next to, behind, in back of, and in front of
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.
discourse functions
including interpretive, logical, participatory, and organizing functions
Interpretive functions
clear the whole of a person’s experience
Logical functions
express logical relations between ideas
Participatory functions
express wishes, feelings, attitudes, and judgments
organizing functions
manage discourse
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
- children spent 45% in conversation with others at the snack table, 44% in silence, and 11% conversing with others who were not at the table.
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Conversational Pragmatics/ adages Grice’s maxims.
four cate-gories pertaining to the Cooperative Principle
- quantity:
- quality:
- relation:
- manner:
quantity:
the amount of information speakers should provide.
- (1) make the conversational contribution as informative as necessary to facilitate the listener’s under-standing
(2) not provide excess information that could lead the listener off track.
quality:
the truthfulness of the language the speaker should use.
- (1) not say something he or she believes to be false
(2) not to say something for which he or she lacks adequate evidence.
relation:
concerns the idea that the speaker should “be relevant”in communicative exchanges.
manner:
concerns not what the speaker says, but how the speaker says it.
(1) avoid being unclear;
(2) avoid being ambiguous;
(3) be brief
(4) be orderly
narrative
is a child’s spoken or written description of a real or fictional event from the past, the present, or the future.
- minimally containing two sequential independent clauses about the same past event
personal narrative & fictional narrative,
kids pretty good at it around at. 4 years
personal narrative
in which an individual shares a factual event,
fictional narrative
which an individual shares an imaginary event.
causal
sequence unfolds following a cause-and-effect chain of events, or provides a reason or rationale for some series of events
temporal
sequence unfolds with time
Ethnographic research
is a qualitative research method that involves gathering data about different societies and cultures with the aim of describing the nature of the populations of interest.
- One well-known method for investigating children’s narrative abilities
many language profiles
simultaneous patterns of language in multiple domains.
- A language profile encompasses only the language domains (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, or pragmatics) and not competencies (such as nar-rative discourse).
Literacy profiles
are simultaneous patterns of literacy, including competencies such as narrative discourse and metasemantics
Inter-individual Variation
- variety of language profiles
- early literacy abilities
- SES:Differences may become even more prominent in the preschool years because not all children attend pre-school programs,
Effects of peers and siblings
- preschoolers with disabilities attend-ing classrooms with peers of higher average language skills had language scores (measured in the spring) about 40% higher
- preschoolers with more than three siblings tend to have smaller receptive vocabularies than preschoolers with fewer siblings
- older siblings who are sensitive to the cognitive needs of their younger siblings provide a rich environment for language development.
effects of gender
in language can be identified for the areas of form, content, and use, although differences in language use (or the domain of pragmatics) are probably the easiest to spot when observing preschool-age boys and girls together.
- both nature and nurture play a role in the relation between gender and language development.
Language Sample Analysis
- to study children’s language achievements is language sample analysis.
- Some common measures of semantics include total num-ber of words (TNW), number of different words (NDW), and type–token ratio (TTR, computed by dividing NDW/TNW). Popular measures of syntax include mean length of utterance (MLU) and developmental sentence scoring
Reliable language
samples are similar across multiple recording contexts for the same child.
Valid language
samples accurately represent the quantity and quality of language a child can produce.
Grammaticality Judgment Tasks
to investigate various kinds of syntactic development in the preschool period.
2 types : well-formedness judgments and judgments about interpretation
well-formedness judgment,
the child must decide whether a sentence is syntactically acceptable.
Judgments about interpretation
the child must interpret one or more parts of a sentence; for example, he or she might have to determine pronoun reference.
Screening.
to determine whether a child is experiencing difficulty with particular aspects of language, and to determine whether a child might need a more comprehensive language evaluation.
- For preschool-age children, clinicians are also concerned with screening children’s emergent literacy abilities.
example: Expressive Vocabulary Test—Second Edition (EVT-2)
Expressive Vocabulary Test—Second Edition (EVT-2)
can screen for difficulties with expressive language and word retrieval. It is particularly useful for screening preschool-ers’ knowledge of high-frequency words, such as body parts, common house-hold objects, foods, colors, and numbers.
- for 2.5 - 90 yrs can be used on
Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening—PreK
screening measure for emergent literacy
to identify chil-dren’s strengths and weaknesses in early literacy to plan instruction for the school year.
comprehensive evaluation
to determine whether a child has a language disorder and, if so, to learn more about the nature of the disorder
- preschoolers’ emergent literacy skills.
progress monitoring
measure and monitor a child’s progress in a certain area of language development.
- in preschool, clinicians can also monitor children’s progress in emergent literacy abilities.
- Oral and Written Language Scales, Second Edition
