Preschool Period 

• Two years prior to a child's entry into elementary school.
• 3 & 5 years of age for children in the U.S.

"Firsts"

• Use language to talk about objects, events, and thoughts not situated in the immediate context.
• Gain important abilities in emergent literacy; transition to comprehension and expressing language in multiple modalities, oral and written.
• Begin to master form, content, and use in new ways. 

Contextualized Language 

• GROUNDED IN OUT IMMEDIATE CONTEXT-- THE HERE & NOW.
• Relies upon background knowledge that a speaker and a listener share, and upon gestures, intonation, and immediately present situational cues. 

Decontextualized Language

• RELIES HEAVILY UPON LANGUAGE ITSELF IN CONSTRUCTION ON MEANING.
• May not contain context cues and does not assume that a speaker and listener share background knowledge or context as is the case for contextualized lang. 
• Cannot rely on the immediate physical context to help communicate to the listener.
• Use higly precise syntax and vocabulary to represent events that are beyond the here and now.
• Fundamental to academic success. 

Emergent Literacy

Earliest period of learning about reading and writing. 

• Need well-developed phonological systems before they are able to make sense of the grapheme (letter) to phoneme (sound) correspondence and need well-developed vocabulary to derive meaning from text. 

Own-name advantage

Learn those letters earlier which occur in their own names.

Letter-name pronunciation effect

Learn earlier those alphabet letters for which the name of the letter is in the letter's procunciation. 

Letter-order Hypothesis

Letters occuring earlier in the alphabet string are learned before letters occurring later in the alphabet string. 

Consonant-order Hypothesis 

Letter for which corresponding consonantal phomemes are learned early in development are learned early in devlopment are learned earlier than letters for which corresponding consonantal phonemes are learned later. 

(Phonological Awareness) "Shallow" Level

• IMPLICIT & RUDIMENTARY SENSITIVITY TO LARGE UNITS OF SOUND STRUCTURE. 
• Segment sentences into words
• Segment multi-syllabic words into syllables.
• Detect & produce rhymes.
• Combine syllable onsets with the remainder of the syllable to produce a word.
• Detect beginning sound simlarities across words.

(Phonological Awareness) "Deep Level"

Achievements in Contents

• Learn an avg of 13,000 words by the time they enter kindergarten
• Fast mapping: Add words to lexicon
• Knowledge of semantics & syntax: Infer meanings of new words.
• Learn new words through shared storybook reading.
• New language content: Deictic & relational terms.

Fast Mapping

Acquire a general representation of a new word with as little as a single exposure. 

Slow Mapping

Refine representations over time with multiple exposures to a word in varying contexts.

Dale's 4-stage vocabulary knowledge development

• Stage 1: No knowledge of a word
• Stage 2: Emergent knowledge
• Stage 3: Contextual knowledge
• Stage 4: Full knowledge

Extended Mapping

Full and complete understanding of a word's meaning.

Principle of novel name-nameless category (N3C)

Select nameless objects as the recipients of novel labels; fast map novel words through this process. 

(New Language Content) Deictic Terms

• USE AND INTERPRETATION DEPENDS ON THE LOCATION OF A SPEAKER AND LISTENER WITHIN A PARTICULAR SETTING. 
• Ex. Here and this: Proximity to the speaker 
• Ex. There and that: Proximity to the listener
• Children must be able to adopt the perspective of their conversational partner.
• Generally mastered by the time they enter schools.

(New Language Content) Relational Terms

• INTERROGATIVES (QUESTIONS), TEMPORAL TERMS, OPPOSITES, LOCATIONAL PERSPECTIVES, AND KINSHIP TERMS.
• Understand and use once they are able to grasp the concepts underlying the terms.

Interrogatives

Understand concrete questions words: what, where, who, whose, and which BEFORE understand and use abstract intereogatives: when, how, why

Kinship Terms (Family)

• Initially interpret kinship terms such as mommy, daddy, sister, and brother to refer to specific individuals.
• Come to undertstand general meaning of these and other kinship terms, including son, daughter, grandfather, grandmother, and parent.
• Complexity of each term has the greatest impact upon the order in which children learn them, followed by children's familiarity with the family member to which each kinship term refers.
• Diffculty with the reciprocity that come kinship term possess. 

Grammatical Morphemes

Units of meaning we add that provide additional grammatical precision. 

Derivational Morphology

• DESCRIBES THE PREFIXES AND SUFFIXES WE ADD TO A WORD TO CHANGE ITS MEANING AND SOMETIMES ITS PART OF SPEECH.
• Common derivational morphemes: pre-, -est, -ness, -ly

Influences on the order by which children acquire grammatical and derivational morphemes: 

• Frequent occuurence in utterance-final position
• Syllabicity
• Single relation between morpheme and meaning
• Consistency in use
• Allomorphic variation
• Clear semantic function

Copula

When the verb be or any of it's derivatives serve as the main verb in a sentence. 

Auxiliary

When the verb be or it's derivatives serve as a helping verb in a sentence.  

Sentence Forms

• Move from simple declarative subject-verb-object constructions and subject-verb-complement constuctions to more elaborate sentence patterns, such as:

Achievements in Phonolgy

• By the end of the preschool period, most children will have mastered nearly all of the phonemes of their native language.
• Two patterns that may persist past the 5th birthday include liquid gliding and substituting.
• Receptive phonology continues to develop important to children's reading development. 

(Discourse Functions) Toodlers' 6 communicative functions

1. Instrucmental
2. Regulatory
3. Personal Interactional
4. Heuristic
5. Imaginative
6. Informational

(Discourse Functions) Preschoolers' expanded functions

• Interpretive Function: Make clear the whole of one's experience.
• Logical Function: Express logical relations between ideas.
• Participatory Function: Express wishes, feelings, attitudes, and judgements.
• Organizing Functions: Manage discourse 

Discourse Functions Cont.

• Continue to detect and use the pragmatic information that others convey in order to understand messages. 
• Children better understand indirect requests when the speaker uses nonverbal pointing in addition to the request. 

Narrative Skills Cont.

• 2 types of narratives:

Theory to Practice

• When talking on the telephone, we lose many of the cues that support face-to-face converstation and must use conversation that is more precise to carry our meaning.
• Talking on the telephone can boost children's narrative skills. 

What Factors Influence Individual Preschoolers' Achievements in Language?

• Children acquire competence in different areas at slightly different times.
• Influences such as socioeconomic status and gender continue to exert effects on children's language development in the preschool period. 

Language Profiles

• Grow more rapidly in some areas and may grow more slowly in other areas.
• Exhibit a variety of language profiles.
• Simultaneous patterns of language in multiple domains. 

Early Literacy Profiles

• Illustrate how children can exhibit varying levels of performance across language and early literacy domains.
• Knowing preschoolers' strengths and weaknesses can help educators tailor early literacy instruction to children's individual needs. 

Effects of Socioeconomic Status on Language Development

• Quailty of teacher-child interactions in the classroom and the quality of teacher language can positively inpact children's own language growth in preschool.
• Teachers can be trained to incorporate high quailty language intervention. 

Effects of Socioeconomic Status on Language Development Cont.

• Benefits of classrooms with mixed SES background:

Effects of Gender on Language Development

• Differences betweent girls and boys remain stable throughout the preschool years
• Issues that could account for gender differences in lang. dev.:

(Language Sample Ana.) Measures of Semantics

(Lang. Sample Ana.) Measures of Syntax

• Mean Length of Utterance (MLU)
• Developmental Sentence Scoring

(Lang. Samples Ana.) Assess Pragmatic Abilities

• Communicative functions the child uses (requesting, commenting, responding to questions)
• Communication acts (repair strategies, interruptions, and false starts) 

(Research Paradigms) Developmental Sentence Scoring

• USED IN CONJUNTION WITH LANG. SAMPLES TO QUANTIFY CHILDREN'S EXPRESSIVE SYNAX DEV.
• Examines structures and assigns point to each category. 

DSS assesses the following 8 grammatical categories:

1. Indefinite pronouns
2. Personal pronouns
3. Main verbs
4. Secondary verbs
5. Negatives
6. Conjunctions
7. Interrogative reversals
8. Wh- questions

Reliable

Similiar across muliple recording contexts for the same child. 

Valid

Accurately represent the quantity and quality of language a child is capable of producing. 

Grammaticality Judgement Tasks

Require that children think about language and make judgements about the appropriateness of specific forms or interpret sentences. 

Well-formedness judgements (GJT)

Decide whether a sentence is syntactically acceptable.

Judgements about interpretation (GJT)

Interpret one or more parts of a sentence, by for example determining reference. 

Auditory Comprehension Scale

• Children's language comprehension abilities.

Expressive Communication Scale

• Children's language production

The Test of Language Dev. Primary, 3rd Ed.

9 Subtests that measure different oral language components. 

Children's comprehension and meaningful use of spoken words (Subtest)

• Picture Voc
• Relational Voc
• Oral Voc

Differing aspects of child's grammar (Subtest)

• Grammatic Understanding
• Sentence Imitation
• Grammatic Completion 

Supplemental subtests the measure children's abilities to pronounce words correctly and to distinguish between words that sound similar

• Word Articulation
• Phonemic Analysis
• Word Discrimination 

The Peabody Picture Voc. Test, 3rd Ed. 

• Norm reference measure of receptive voc.
• Examiner presents set of 4 pictures on a page and then ask the child to point to one of the pics
• Provides normative references of receptive voc for children and adults of all age.
• Used in conjunction with other measures of language ability to make assessments about children's lang. competencies. 

Clinical Evaluation of Lang. Fundamentals Preschool- 2nd Ed. 

• NORM REFERENCE ASSESSMENT OF LANG. ABILITIES FOR CHILDREN FROM AGE 3-6
• 8 Subtests:    - Sentence structure 

Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening- PreK

• SCREENING INSTRUMENT TO IDENTIFY CHILDREN'S STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES IN EARLY LITERACY TO PLAN INSTRUCTION FOR THE SCHOOL YEAR.

Test of Early Reading Ability, 3rd Ed. 

• NORM REFERENCED MEASURE OF CHILDREN'S MASTERY OF EARLY DEVELOPING READING SKILLS.