Preschool Language Development: Pragmatics & Semantics

Pragmatic and Semantic Development in Preschool Children

Children learn language in a conversational context. The primary director of the conversation is often an adult, but the child also expands their network of partners. During the preschool years, children acquire many conversational abilities, often influenced by mothers. Preschool children enjoy their own monologues, sometimes aloud.

Pragmatic Development

Pragmatic development refers to how children learn language in a conversational context.

The Context of Conversation

Children under 2 years can respond to their partner and engage in small talk, though their abilities limit the number of subjects. This stage involves behaviors of initiative and response.

Conversational Skills

Young children are very skilled at introducing topics. By the age of three, children can endure conversational shifts. Between 24-30 months, the amount of verbal responses increases. Children under 2 years do not typically take their interlocutor's perspective into account. Children aged 3-4 years begin to use elliptical answers (omitting redundant information). Children under 2 years use language in imaginative ways. By 4 years, children love to talk about feelings and emotions. Mothers and children aged two and a half years experience less than 5% disruption in conversation. Children aged 3 use filler expressions.

Specific Conversational Abilities

• Records, Petitions, Quotas: Children are able to respond but not consistently.
• Turn-Taking: At 1 year, children manage two or three shifts; pairs of 2 years manage turns during broadcasts.
• Adapting to the Listener: By 3 years, children show awareness.
• Guidelines and Petitions: Related to directing or requesting.
• Deixis: Means intention or signal. Deictic terms (like 'here', 'there', 'this', 'that') can be used to direct attention.

Metalinguistic Abilities

Metalinguistic abilities enable language users to consider language independently from their understanding and production. These capabilities are listed in preschool but are typically understood more fully around age 7 or 8, when children can analyze meaning and linguistic corrections.

Knowledge Development Agenda

This describes the progression of a child's awareness and control over language use:

• 1.5-2 years: Children control their own utterances as they occur.
• 3-4 years: Children consider the outcome of actual utterances, perform reality checks, and try to learn language deliberately.
• School Age: Children predict consequences of using specific structures, reflected in the process of language production.

Reading and Writing

Reading and writing are indicators of successful oral language ability. There is a relationship between phonological awareness (like rhymes and games) and reading ability. Reading involves the synthesis of a complex network of perceptual and cognitive actions, operating from the recognition and decoding of words to their understanding and integration. Early contact with reading and writing material is important.

Reading Process

For reading, language must be decontextualized. Two theories exist: Down-Up (bottom-up) and Up-Down (top-down). Reading involves predictions of following words and sentences. This is an interactive process, so the relative contribution of each component depends on the type of material involved.

Reading Development

Reading is learned through social interaction. Examples include reading recipes. Development occurs in stages:

• Stage 1 (Early Primary): Children use conversational rules to interpret words.
• Stages 3 and 4: Children are capable of reading unfamiliar words.
• Stage 4 to End of Primary: This is a phased line where the reader is oriented from decoding towards comprehension.

Writing Process

Some structures very common in spoken language are very sporadic in written language. Around 9 or 10 years, written language has been freed of most of the features of spoken language.

Development of Writing

Children pretend to write. At first, the first letter may represent the entire word. Later, children represent syllables or even missing vowels and spaces. By 3rd or 4th grade (primary), children are aware of the needs of the reader. Writing develops over 4 stages: preparation, consolidation, differentiation, and integration.