language repoertoire increases in complexity, size, and in use within conversation and narration

Children learn to pun and find humor in word play

Creative language in camp songs, nursery rhymes, jump-rope rhymes, and jokes

Jump in pragmatic and semantics

Syntactic development is intrasentential (phrase level)

Meta linguistic awareness becomes developed

Learn exceptions to rules

• Good sense of left v. right
• hand preference but can do fine motor skills like dressing/cutting with knife, drawing pictures
• Understands Yesterday, today, tomorrow (which also influences understanding of cause and effect/before and after
• Believe in magic
• Use adult-like language (still missing more subtle, syntactic structures AND pragmatics missing)
• Communication and cognition increeases
• Center into peer-relationships vs. familiar ones

• Nearly adult size brain (though all mature connections not made)
• Inferred reality: inference about a problem based on appearances and internal information
• Decentration: the ability to consider several aspects of a physical problem at once
• Transformational thought: viewing a problem existing in time and anticipate consequences
• Reversible mental operations: enable a child to recognize that change can be undone or reversed
• ToM continues to develop (emerges at 4): children realize their reality is not the only one
• Children learn to manipulate and influence others, especially through language
• PERIOD OF STABILIZATION

• Demonstrates the most dramatic linguistic change
• language use
• Children learn to differentiate between registers (classroom talk vs. conversation talk)
• Text-related language language becomes relatively more important than social, interpersonal language
• CHILDREN MUST LEARN THE CODE OF SCHOOL/TEXT/ACADEMICS or they may have a difficult time learning to differentiate and walk the two worlds (Think of children with AAE)

The ability to move from rigid, one-dimensional descriptions of objects/events to coordinated, multiattributional ones, allowing both speaker and listener to recognize that there are many dimensions and perspectives to any given topic.

Early children's descriptions are more personal and do not consider the information available to the listener.

• Recount (tells about past experiences in which a child paricipated or observed or about which a child read and is usually requested by an adult
• Eventcast: explanation of some current or anticipated event and may be used to direct others in imaginative play sequences (You're the daddy; and you prtend to get dressed)
• Accounts are highly individualized spontaneous narratives in which children share their experiences and are not reporting information requested by adults
• Stories are fictionalized and with seemingly endless content variation, have a known and anticipated pattern or structure in which the main character must overcome some problem or challenge

• In upper-/middle- class families, earliest narratives are eventcasts that occur during nurturing activities, such as play, and reading.
• Accounts and stories are shared
• By age 3, children are expected to appreciate and use all narrative forms
• For working class, this might not be true, since recounts are controlled by the interrogator and accounts won't begin until children start school

• First learn to produce narratives in long strings, seemingly rambles
• Then learn to use causal connectiveness at age 6
• Causality involves intentions, emotions, thoughts, connectives (because, as a result of, since)
• PLANS: If, then (means to an end)
• scripts (dialogs accompanying familiar routines)
• Stories begin to contain more information about mental or physical states, then move to motives for actions
• NO central plot before 4/5, then plots emerge between 5/7 (moving into interwoven problems/solutions)
• second graders use beginning/ending markers in fictional narratives
• 8 year olds have a stronger command of storytelling than other ages.
• upper-elementary grade school children tend to be able to summarize/infer moreso than their younger counterparts.

• Components/rules of narrative structures that forms a narrative framework and the internal structure of a story
• Acceptable components are culturally based
• In English, the basic components are: setting+episode structure
• Setting statement, intiating event, internal response, internal plan, attempt, direct consequence, reaction
• There was this boy (setting) and he got kidnapped by pirates (event). He missed his dog (response to event), so he decided to escape (internal plan). When they were all eating, he cut the ropes (attempt), and he got away (direct consequence), and he lived on an island with his dog, and they played in the sand everyday (reaction)
• may be linked additively (and), temporally (and then, so then), causally (so, because), or in a mixed fashion

Describe characters, setting, and habitual actions

SSS

There was a girl who was pretty. She liked to play. The end.

have chronological order for actions but no causal relations

S+AAA

I was locked out of the house (S) and then I went to the door. then I went to the window. the I went to the neighbor's house. the end.

Consists of a series of events in which changes cause other changes with no goal-directed behaviors

S, IE, A, A, A

There was this bird and she had some hungry babies, so she flew out the nest. She looked everywhere. then she flew back to her nest. The end

Setting statement, initiating event/internal response/attempt, +direct consequence

I knew a girl and she fell of her bike. She was hurt. (SS, IE, DC)

Multiple episodes

Setrting statement, two IE, IR, A; DC;followed by another episode and a reaction at the end

two separate but parallel episodes that influence each other

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• Underachieving children may be shorter, less internal organization/cohesion, contain fewer story grammar components and less sentence complexity
• Depends on culture (AA more rambling, seemingly less organized)

• A characteristic of AA female narratives, theme-related incidents that make an implicit point, such as the need to help your  baby brother or to avoid someone
• may lack clear indicators like characters, place, or shifts in time

Language functions increase greatly with classroom demands

The expectation of a classroom teacher may differ greatly from that of a child

As children grow older (between 4-8), the style-switching becomes more pronounced and obvious

With peers, students are more elaborate, use more nonlinguistic noises, and exact repetitions

WIth adults, a child uses different codes for his parents than for those outside the family (parents get more whines, demands, and shorter, less conversational narratives)

School-age children introduce a topic into the conversation, sustain it through several turns, and close or switch the topic.

These skills develop gradually throughout elementary school and contrast to preschool performance (preschoolers only maintain topic 20% of the time)

Topic maintenance increases with age and then moves to more abstract discussion (around age 11)

• Does not refer directly to what the speaker wants (i.e. The sun sure is a scorcher today may be an indirect request for a drink)
• Represents awareness of socially appropriate requests and the communication context
• Appears in pre-school years, then increases until 5. After five, the proportion remains the same, BUT the structure changes
• More indirect with adults than with peers
• With age, children can distinguish requests for information or compliance
• must and should are difficult to comprehend because they may require an opposite desire (Shouldn't you go outside? really means You should go outside)

• By 6, children realize that merely repeating for repair may not be sufficient, so they may elaborate some elements in the repeition and in turn provide more information
• 9 year olds provide much more information and can address the perceived source of a breakdown in communication by providing terms, context, or talking about the process

• Such as this, that, these those, here, there
• By school age, here there are correct
• By 7, demonstratives are correct, but they may not incorporate all semantic features of demonstratives (thise, that, these, those) (such as pronoun and demonstrative use)
• Understanding the listener/speaker pserpective. Children must understand distance and they must understand that the speaker is the referent, the deictic aspect of demonstratives

• Children store words based on root words, morphological variations
• Vocabulary growth (new words) does not necessarily indicate semantic growth or deeper understanding or words
• Semantic connectivity is also important (homonyms, synonyms, antonyms, semantic concepts, semantic classes)
• Varies widely with SES, educational level, gender, age, and cultural background

• Adding features to the definition that are common to the adult definition (slowmaps word definition beyond the functional and physical properties that are core aspects of the definitions of children)
• Children bring together all the definitions that can fit a single word

• Related to the metalinguistic acquisition...definitional skills and megalinguistics increase with age and educational level
• definitions based on individual experiences to more socially shared meaning
• syntactically from single-word action definitions to sentences expressing complex relationships
• Occurs at around 2nd grade
• 11 year olds have more adult-like definitions

• Although children initially understand in, on, and at, they also have to develop an understanding of those words in a temporal relationship (On MOnday, In the morning, At midnight) in addition to their locative meaning
• This aspect is not learned or fully understood until 10

• shift in elementary school years
• decrease in the use of nonspecific and general terms and a corresponding increase in the use of specific spatial terms from 4-7 (here, there changes to away from the window, toward the door changes to top, up, left) increasing precision

• adults organize language in various ways:
• taxonomies (categories of objects that share a common essence such as trees or tools)
• Objects related by theme are bound by events (ie cake presents, candles, birthday party)
• taxonomic knowledge more fragile than tehmatic ones, but children are able to caterogize/organize by 6 in adult-like ways
• thematic knowledge increases and with development/education, taxonomies strengthen and are less affected by task/context

• chunking--semantically related information into categories used for remembering
• Using semantic relations resolves word ambiguities (their, they're, there, a child uses semantics)
• Categorical structures are stored hierarchically
• facilitative neural networks connect related word-concept structures
• Levels of linguistic processing:Surface-Syntactic rules and phonetic strings; Deep-semantic categories and relations; Contextual-situation or image
• Children shift from surface to deep strategies

• Words used in an imaginative way to create an imaginative or emotional impression
• Indicates higher language functions and correlates with adolescent literacy skills
• 9/10 children rate sarcastic criticism as more "mean" than irony--indicating a better understanding of speaker's intention
• Primary types are: idioms (short, unanalyzable expressions), metonyms (figures of speech in which an individual example stands in for a whole category of things (so Washington refers to the US government or "all hands on deck" refers to sailors coming up to help), metaphors (compare/contrast entity), similes (compare/contrast entity using like or as), and proverbs (Short, popular sayings)

• Refers to the extent of the literal-figurative language. The more transparent the idiom, the easier it is for a child or adult to interpret them (hold your tongue vs. beat around the bush)

• Children can be creative with their language, but as their vocabular and understanding of words increases, their use of creative language may decrease (although the ability is still there as seen in creative writing)
• Comprehension may be context-dependent and production lags comprehension
• Older children make metaphorical matches across sensory domains (colors demonstrating psychological states)

• Comprehension connected to analogical reasoning (____is to _____ as _____ is to _______)

• Closely related to reading and listening comprehension skills
• world knowledge dependent
• learning context dependent
• and metaphoric transparency dependent
• Context exposure is more important than frequency exposure

• First learned orally

• Most children produce three-element NPs
• Post-noun embedded clause is add by 72 months (6 years old)
• Child distinguishes using subject pronouns, object pronouns, and reflexives and must understand analysis of interpreting pronouns across sentences (last part established by age 10)
• Children use quantifying modifiers for mass nouns and quantifiers for count nouns

• Verbs offer more difficulty than nouns
• Reversed in three ways (with -un, use of a particle following the verb--on/off--separate lexical item open/close)
• Modals express a semantic notion of possibility, obligation, permission, intention, validity, truth, and functionality

• Troublesome for English-speaking children because of reversibility (agent comes before action)
• Use contextual support to interpret passive sentences before
• Early passives begin in pre-school years (It got broken)
• Reversible (either noun could be the actor or the object...The dog was chased by the cat OR The cat was chased by the dog)
• instrumental nonreversible (noun cannot be reversed..The window was broken by the ball...inanimate instrument is the noun)
• agentive nonreversible (subject is agent, the window was broken by the boy)
• Children use both equally but prior to 4, they produce more reversible passives with word-order confusion
• Agentives occur at 9
• instrmental occur at 11-13. Semantic dinstinctions are signaled by prepositional use (reversibles use by and nonreversibles use with...adults may use either/or)
• Intellectual stimulation and expanded knowledge change syntactic complexity