Prelinguistic Development
Stage 1: Reflexive Vocalizations (Birth-2mo)
What are the vocalizations and understanding at this stage?
Vocalizations: crying and vegetative sounds (coughing) with some vowel-like sounds.
Understanding: startles at loud sounds, recognizes caregiver's voice, smiles when caregiver is talking
What Speech and Language skills are expected between ages 1 and 2?
- understand opposites (rain/sun, open/close, on/off)
- follow 2-step directions (get the ball and put it in the box, pick up your crayon and color your paper)
What is encoding?
Children developing a response they can express
What grammatical morpheme is first to develop?
- Grammatical tense indicating an action is in progress
Ex. Mommy cooking, Daddy reading
Expected age of mastery: 19mo-28mo
A toddler points to a cat they see on a walk and looks back at their parent to see if they saw it too.
Joint Attention
Stage 4: Canonical Babbling (6mo-12mo)
What are the vocalizations and the understanding during this stage?
Vocalizations: uses consonant-vowel (CV) sequences, including reduplicated babbles (dada, mama) and variegated syllables (ma, bi, du)
Understanding: turns and looks toward sounds, turns when name is called, understands common words (mama, dada, ball, doggy), plays games, listens to short stories
What is underextension?
Children learn to detach specific word meanings from the setting in which they first learned the word
- Context influences understanding
Ex. a bear can be a stuffed animal instead of a physical animal at the zoo, in the woods, or in a book
Children breaking down information for understanding
What is an article?
A word that comes before a noun to show whether it is specific (the) or general (a).
Who are considered "late talkers"?
Children who demonstrate appropriate receptive language but tend to use fewer words and word combinations than expected
Outgrow: frequent use of gestures to communicate, a greater number of speech sounds produced with errors expected for their age, better accuracy in speech sound production and syllable structure
Do Not Outgrow: simplified syllable structure, fewer verb forms, less pretend play, poorer performance on measures of receptive language
Stage 2: Cooing (2mo-4mo)
What are the vocalizations and understanding during this stage?
Vocalizations: comfort-like vocalizations (cooing and laughing)
Understanding: moves eyes in the direction of sound, responds to different voice tones, attends to music, notices toys that make sounds.
What categories of speech sounds are the most difficult for young children to master?
Liquids (/l/, /r/)
Fricatives (/s/, /z/, /f/, /v/)
Affricatives (/ch/, /dg/)
What are Internal Factors vs External Factors on semantic development?
Internal: attention and memory processes (attention span, memory, developmental language disorders, etc.)
External: type of input received (language exposure, amount of social interactions, different dialects at home, etc.)
What is the last grammatical morpheme to develop?
Contractible Auxiliary
- shortened form of the helping verb that supports the main verb in a sentence
Ex. He'd like to play, She's over there
Expected age of mastery: 30mo-50mo
What is intelligibility? What are factors that influence it?
The clarity of speech and the amount of speech that a listener can understand
Factors: Phonology, articulation, motor speech skills, etc.
Stage 5: Jargon Stage (10 months and beyond)
What are the vocalizations and understanding during this stage?
Vocalizations: syllables produced with different stress and intonation patterns, sounding like conversational speech accompanied by a gesture (saying up and sticking arms out, waving to say goodbye), imitates speech sounds, a few words may be unclear, even at 12 months
Understanding: points and shows objects to others
What Speech and Language skills are expected between the ages of 3 and 4?
- use specific speech sounds (produce /g/, /k/, /f/, /t/, /n/)
- ask questions (Why? How? Where?)
- produce rhyming words (cat/bat, pig/big)
- use pronouns (I, me, we, they, you)
- begin using plural words (trees, cats, cars, bugs)
- answer simple questions (responds to who, what how, where, etc.)
THERE ARE MORE, REFER TO SLIDE 12 ON CH 3 SLIDESHOW
What is syntax?
Rules that are followed to build sentences
- Simple sentences are made out of a noun phrase and a verb phrase
Ex. The dog (noun phrase) barked loudly (verb phrase)
What is an uncontractible copular?
A copula is a verb form of "to be" (is, are, were, was) that is the main verb in a sentence and is not a contraction.
ex. He is, in response to Who is here?
What is pragmatics?
The use of language in social contexts or for social purposes
- Ex. turn taking, not interrupting, explaining background
Stage 3: Vocal Play (4mo-6mo)
What are the vocalizations and understanding during this stage?
Vocalizations: loud and soft sounds appear (yelling and whispering), more sustained vowel productions, and trill sounds (like raspberries)
Understanding: same as stage 2
What is overextension?
Children generalize meanings of words based on similar features of the objects
Ex. saying cat for a cat and a dog
- they are both fuzzy, cute animals that could be inside of their home
What is morphology?
Rules that exist for building words and enhancing word meaning
- Morphemes- smallest unit of language that add meaning to words
Ex. Play=played, dog=dogs
What is the expected age of mastery for irregular past tense?
25mo-46mo
What is Joint Attention?
Occurs when a child shows interest in or connection with another, coordinating their visual attention or gaze to the same activity or object of their communication partner