Speech & Language

Development

CSCD 3301
Felicidad Garcia, PhD, CCC-SLP
Readings contributing to today’s
lecture
Ch. 8 (pp. 208-233)
Preschool Development
 The average Mainstream American English
speaking 3 year old has an expressive
vocabulary of 900-1,000 words.
 By age 4, many children in preschool write
‘letters’ or imitations of letters. Socially,
children at play at this age cooperate with
others and increasingly involve role-play,
not just object play.
 Preschool Pragmatics
 Preschool-aged conversation is distinctive for certain conversational
pragmatics.
1. Topic Maintenance – fewer than 20% of a young preschooler’s
responses may be relevant to the speaking partner’s previous utterance.
2. Theory of Mind (ToM) – children mention mental states over 70% of
the time in conversation (usually think, feel, remember)
3. Register – by age 4, when most children are role-playing, they change
their style of speaking to reflect a character (or even when speaking to
younger children; they use CDS)
4. Conversational Repair – verbal (e.g., huh? What?) and non-verbal
(e.g., confused expression) requests for clarification to continue
conversation, but may have difficulty specifying what isn’t
understood.
5. Presuppositions – before age 3, most children do not understand the
effect of not providing enough information for their listener; often too
much or too little.
  Topic – the content about which we
Topics speak; big picture: it makes a
conversation or narrative cohesive &
coherent.
 By age 2, a child can maintain a
topic in adjacent utterances (e.g.,
question/answer)
 By age 3, approx. ¾ of a child’s
utterances are on topic, and children
up to the age of 5 may use repetition
to fill turns and maintain topic.
ADULT: Tonight, we’ll go to the bodega
and buy some cookies.
CHILD: Go bodega and buy cookies.
ADULT: Yeah, should we get some milk,
too?
CHILD: Yeah, milk, too.
Intentions

Wells (1985)
broadly defined
6 pragmatic
intentions to
children’s early
utterances,
which stabilize
throughout the
rest of the
preschool
period.
 Intentions

• Representational category is dominated by the statement function, which increases to 50% of all
representational intentions and becomes 20% of all utterances overall, by age 5.
• The wanting function that dominated toddler language decreases, requesting function increases.
• Control intentions increases, including prohibition (e.g., “don’t do that”), intention (“I’m going to
put it in”), request permission (“Can I have one?”), suggestion (“Should we have ice cream?”),
physical justification (e.g., I can’t because doll is in there), offer (“Do you want this one?”) and
indirect request (“will you pour the juice?”).
 Narrative Development
 Narratives – initially develop as oral stories and are
distinguished as an uninterrupted stream of language modified
by the speaker to capture and hold the listener’s interest.
 Can include: self-generated stories, telling of familiar tales,
retelling of books, movies or television shows and recounting
personal experiences.
 To produce a narrative, the speaker must present an explicit, topic-
centered discussion that clearly states the relationships
between events, where events are linked to one another in a
predictable manner.
Narrative Development
 While storytelling is universal, the manner in which
they are told varies between cultures (McGregor,
2000). Themes vary:
 American children: individualism through character’s
increasing autonomy and personal perspective
 Mexican, Caribbean, Central & South American
children: collectivism and family
 Chinese children: proper social interactions, morals
and authority
Narrative Development
 Relating a narrative requires an understanding of event structure.
By age 2- 3 ½ children can talk about things that have happened
to them in the past, so that around age 3, children are able to
describe chains of events within familiar activities (e.g., a
birthday party); this familiar sequence of events is the script.

Narratives rely on:

1. Centering – the linking of entities to form a story nucleus.
2. Chaining – the sequence of events that share attributes and
lead from one to the other.
Narrative Types

Hedberg & Westby, 1993)

 Description
Sheet here!

Narrative Stages
Stage Name Ages
I Heaps 2 years
II Sequences 2-3 years
III Primitive Narratives 3-4 years
IV Unfocused Chains 4-4 ½ years
V Focused Chains 5 years
VI True Narrative 5-6 years and refined
over grade school

(Hedberg & Stoel-Gammon, 1986)

Narrative Analysis
 Macrostructure – what is the stage, what basic
structures in place (e.g., narrative shape)
 Microstructure – what are the elements present
that create cohesion & coherence (e.g., form and
content)
Narrative Examples
3 year old story retell in ASL

 Original story in Mainstream American English

 Theory
of Mind

 Theory of mind (ToM) begins at the development of joint

attention/reference and continues to develop throughout
childhood and adolescence.
 Communicative abilities are closely tied with ToM
development, because they often require a consideration of
mental states (Astington, 2003; Lohmann & Tomasello,
2003).
 Theory of Mind Development
 Apologies – seen after age 2; first elicited directly (“Tell her
you’re sorry”), then indirectly (“How do you think she
feels?”) by parents
 Self-awareness – begins at 18 months with recognition of
self and at 2 years trying to express their internal states;
development of understanding what others can see (e.g.,
covering eyes to hide, referring to objects only they can see)
 False Beliefs – arguably the most important to
communicative competence; between 3-5 years, a child gains
the capacity to take into account that ignorance or lack of
information on the part of their listener may lead to false
beliefs by others; they begin to adapt language to take
listener’s previous knowledge into account.
Next class:
 Preschool Semantics & Morphology