Contextualized language
- Grounded in the immediate context
- Relies on the background knowledge that a speaker and listener share
- Relies on gestures, intonation, and immediately present situational cues
Decontextualized language
- Relies heavily on the language itself in the construction of meaning
- When a child wants to discuss people, places, objects, and events that are not immediately present
- Fundamental to academic success
- Nearly all learning in schools focuses on events and concepts beyond the classroom
Fairly reliable progression of ToM
- Demonstrate sensitivity to diverse desires
- Demonstrate sensitivity to diverse beliefs
- Demonstrate sensitivity to knowledge access (the understanding that something can be true but someone might not know it to be true)
- Understand false belief (knowing that something can be true but that another person might believe something different) - PRESCHOOL
- Understand hidden emotion (understanding that a person can feel a certain way while displaying a different emotion)
- Understand sarcasm
Sentential complements
Structures that represent a person’s speech or mental state… knowledge of these helps facilitate theory of mind development
Emergent literacy
The earliest period of learning about reading and writing
Children’s literacy abilities depend heavily on:
The oral language skills they began to acquire in infancy and toddlerhood
Emergent literacy achievements depend largely on children’s ______________
Metalinguistic ability
Metalinguistic ability
The ability to view language as an object of attention
What are the three important achievements in emergent literacy?
Alphabet knowledge, print awareness, and phonological awareness
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
Children are often familiar with the letters that make up their names by?
5 years old
Four hypotheses that characterize the order in which preschool children learn the names of the individual alphabet letters
- 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 alphabet string before letters occurring later in the alphabet string
- Consonant-order hypothesis: children learn letters for which corresponding consonantal phonemes are learned early in development before letters for which corresponding consonantal phonemes are learned later
Print awareness
Children’s understanding of the forms and functions of written language
Developmental continuum of print awareness
- Print interest: developing an interest and appreciation for print
- Print functions: understanding that print has meaning and a specific function
- Print conventions: knowing that print is organized in specific ways (left to right, top to bottom)
- Print forms: print units can be differentiated and names (words, letters)
- Print part-to-whole relationships: print units can be combined into other print units (including how letters combine to form words)
Phonological awareness and when it begins
Children’s sensitivity to the sound units that make up speech (phonemes, syllables, words… awareness begins at around age 2)
Phonological processes
The systematic errors children make in their speech
What age range has the fastest suppression rate?
3-4 years
What may 4-year-olds still have, but should be gone by age 5?
Weak syllable deletion
Past age 5, what phonological processes might kids still struggle with?
Liquid gliding and stopping
Alphabetic principle
The relationship between letters or combinations of letters and sounds
The most significant area of morpheme development in the preschool period is:
Verb morphology
Mapping a new word to its corresponding object, event, action, or concept
The mapping problem or Quinean conundrum
Six factors that contribute to the order in which children acquire grammatical and derivational morphemes
- Frequent occurrence in utterance-final position: infants and children are most sensitive to sounds and words at the ends of utterances (they first learn morphemes occurring as suffixes)
- Syllabicity: children first learn morphemes that constitute their own syllables (ing) before morphemes that only contain a single sound (s)
- Single relation between morpheme and meaning: children first learn morphemes with only one meaning (the) before morphemes that have multiple meanings (s)
- Consistency in use: children learn morphemes that are used consistently more easily than ones that vary in their use
- Allomorphic variation: children learn morphemes that have a consistent pronunciation before the ones with allophonic variations
- Clear semantic function: children first learn morphemes that have a clear meaning (plural morpheme) before ones with less clear meaning (third-person singular - he runs)
Slow mapping
Refining representations with time and multiple exposures to a word in various contexts
