development test 3

When is it no longer appropriate to use MLUm/w for measuring complexity?

"When a child reaches MLUm of 4.0 (i.e., generally at/after 4 y/o), s/he is able to make constructions of great variety and complexity; the MLUm then depends more on the nature of the speech interactions from which it is calculated, so it ceases to be a good index of grammatical knowledge and language development." •But it does still give you a sense of productivity, which could be useful in therapy as measures of progress.

Summary: Elements of Reading

1. Phonemic Awareness - the ability to focus on and manipulate phonemes, or speech sounds, in spoken syllables and words. 2. Phonics - understanding how letters are linked to sounds to form letter-sound correspondences and spelling patterns. 3. Fluency- the ability to read quickly and accurately, thought to demonstrate the level of reading automaticity. 4. Vocabulary - building lexical diversity

Summary: Prerequisites for Reading

1.Ability to analyze symbols of speech 2.Recognize and categorize objects. 3.Development of imitation -ability to translate auditory and/or visual input into a motor analog. 4.Development of intentionality (i.e., deliberately use sound to express meaning) 5.Basic development of memory

Theory of Mind Development

1.Apologies - seen after age 2; first elicited directly ("Tell her you're sorry"), then indirectly ("How do you think she feels?") by parents 2.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) 3.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.

Development of Phonemic Awareness

1.Words 2.Syllable Segmentation/Blend 3.Onset and Rimes 4.Isolated Phonemes

Morpheme-Grapheme Development

6 y/o - rely on orthographic regularity to spell (i.e., phonetic transparency) 7-9 y/o - sensitive to both orthographic and morphological aspects of the word (Deacon, LeBlanc, & Sabourin, 2011)Development of morpheme-grapheme relationship comprehension, includes the acquisition of concepts like: Vowel representation of phonological variation (e.g., later-latter) Morphophonemic variation (e.g., sign-signal) Consonant doubling (e.g., Mississippi, committee) Root words and derivations (e.g., add - addition) Stressed/unstressed syllables (e.g., report) Typical spelling development takes time, is word specific, and is nonlinear across parameters (orthography, phonology & morphology) Common errors occur when integrating these aspects. ex. missed mist In children and young teens, these errors indicate an understanding of phonologic and morphologic change but cannot consistently mark the change orthographically. Overall, inflectional suffix spelling follows the order in which children learn to express them in oral language in pre-school (with individual differences): progressive, regular plural possessive, 3rdperson singular & regular past tense

Attention, memory, & executive function

A decline in working memory is a normal consequence of aging (Baddeley et. al, 1999). Divided attention performance drops as task difficult increases, but sustained and selective attention do not typically decline (Gliskey, 2007) Executive functions - response inhibition, flexibility, abstraction (Harada et al, 2013)

Imperative Sentence Form

Adult imperative sentences appear at 2 ½ years. Gimme a cookie, please. Throw the ball to me.

Syntax

All common syntactic forms are present by the late teen years. Actual usage and fluency are determined by multiple factors. •Education, profession, social group, etc. But... the capacity for new syntactic learning is still there. •Structural priming •Statistical learning.

School Age Narratives

As a child's narrative skills develop, they are characterized by: 1.Fewer unresolved problems and unprepared resolutions 2.Less extraneous detail 3.More overt marking of changes in time and place 4.More introduction, including setting and character info 5.Greater concern for motivation and internal reactions 6.More complex episode structure 7.Closer adherence to the story grammar model

Preschool Semantic Development

Between the ages of 1 ½ -6 y/o, children add an average 5 words to their lexicon daily. Children rely on word order and morphology to determine the semantic case(e.g., agent & patient) information; required to comprehend and produce language about different roles in an event, which can vary by language. Ex. 1. "The girl hugged the friend." This is understood before: 2. "The friend was hugged by the girl."

Preschool Morphologic Development

Bound morphemes (e.g., -s, -ed, -ing, etc.) may be be more difficult in all American English speakers because they're: 1.Phonologically reduced & unstressed monosyllabic bits of language 2.Carry little meaning, often redundant (e.g.,two cakes) 3.Often multifunctional (e.g., plural, possessive, or present tense -s marker) Bound morphemes for -s markers, are not fully understood until around age 7 (Beyer & Hudson Kam, 2009). The exact manner through which children acquire grammar is unknown. Brain imaging studies have shown regular and irregular language rules are processed in different areas of the brain (inferior frontal vs. middle temporal regions, respectively) - suggesting irregular language rules rely on memory/meaning to be incorporated into the lexicon as opposed to purely syntactic functions (see Gernsbacher & Kaschak, 2003 for a review) Mean length of utterance (MLU) is a moderate predictor of language complexity development in English speaking children, up to 4.0. After 4.0, lengthening slows down and individual variation makes the measure less reliable. In general, morphological learning is characterized by U-shaped growth. This means that at first, it appears as if the rule has been learned correctly, then the child makes more errors (under/overgeneralizations) and then returns to correct usage.

School-age Narrative Development

By age 6, children's narratives gain causal coherence, and describe motives for actions. Causal relationship move toward the ending of the initial situation called a climax. Mature narratives may consist of a single episode (1 problem, 1 climax, 1 resolution) or several episodes (an ongoing story with obstacles). But it may also have many episodes. Example: Once, there was a girl named Malala. She was shot by the local Taliban for attempting to go to school in northwest Pakistan. After she recovered, she led an international movement for girls' education and became just a little bit famous. How many episodes are in this story?

Interrogative Sentence Form

Children begin to ask questions at the one-word level through the use of intonation (e.g., hypothesis testing: "Dog?" "No, cat.") A preschooler's ability to answer questions is influenced by both the type of question and the verb in the question (Salomo, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2014) Questions prevalent in adult speech to children are usually made to direct gaze and comment on where they are gazing Examples: Are you looking at the puppy?What is daddy doing? The first phase of question development (at MLU 1.75-2.25, typically) has 3 question forms: Nucleus + intonation That horsie? What + noun phrase + (doing) What doggie (doing)?Where + noun phrase + (going)Where man (going)?

Clause Review

Clause - a group of related words that contains both a subject and verb (e.g., "a dog running") Different from a phrase, which is a group of related words that does not contain a subject-verb relationship (e.g., "in the morning" or "running down the street") 2 main types: 1.independent clause - expresses a complete thought, so it can stand by itself. 2.dependent clause (aka, subordinate clause) - expresses only part of a thought, so it cannot stand alone.

Compound Sentence Development

Compound sentences express a collection of items, events, people, which children can cognitively do by 27 m/o. An ordered series (i.e., temporal markers) may begin with use of and, such as: And I petted the dog. And he barked. And I runned home. At approx. MLU of 3.5 (~3y/o) the conjunctionbecauseappears, either alone or attached to a single clause, which at first demonstrates an inability to give reverse order: Adult: Why did you fall off your bicycle?Child: Because. Adult: But why did it happen?Child: Because I hurted my leg. Because the order of conjunction acquisition reported for American English seems to be true for other languages as well, it may reflect the underlying cognitive relationship. For ex.: In their use of because, children tend to initially use it to mark psychological causality before recounting events in a reversed manner. Example: "Because he's mean" occurring before "because the truck fell" Order of acquisition in terms of the semantic relationships expressed in the use of conjunctions between clauses form a hierarchy: 1.Additive - no relationship; (e.g., "and") 2.Temporal - sequential or simultaneous; (e.g., "while", "and then," "after that") 3.Causal - first in order (e.g., using "and")and then reversed (e.g., with the use of "because") 4.Contrastive - opposing relationship (e.g., using "but"). Clausal conjoining first occurs with and at 3 ½ y/oand in an all-purpose manner: I went to the party andJamie hit me. (meaning then) We left and mommy called. (meaning when) She went home and they had a fight. (meaning because) Even in 5 y/o kids, and is the most frequent conjunction in narratives, however clausal conjoining with if appears shortly after, followed by because, when, but, and so. Around age 4, children may begin to exhibit conjoining and embedding of both phrases and clauses within the same sentence (sparingly). Sally wants to stay on the sand but Carrie is scared of the crabs.Infinitive phrase (wants) + prepositional phrase (on the sand) with a conjunction but and a second independent clause of the same construction. Also three-clause sentences, embedded and conjoined: Diego flew his kite,I ate a hot dog, and papa took a nap. Or I saw Spider-Man, and Clara saw the onethat had that other guy. Three clauses embedded and conjoined with the last one being a dependent clause.By 4 ½ - 5 y/o, multiple embeddings and three-clause sentences may account for about 11% of all child utterances.

Genderlect in Conversation

Contrary to popular belief, men have been shown to be more verbose than women: the longest speaking time occurs when men speak with other men. People of all genders interrupt a woman when speaking more often than a man. In conversations between men and women, 36% of topics introduced by women were maintained, versus 96% of male-introduced topics. Often, it was because women sustained the topic by asking questions. Women's language contains more inclusive terms like let's and we. Parodies are popular because they illuminate the gendered differences between communication styles.

Closing thoughts:

Despite not being implicitly learned skills like receptive and expressive language, reading & writing is critical to academic success in language related tasks in schools. Reading and writing are not simply reverse skills; each require different skills70% of children with oral language impairments will later exhibit reading and written impairments Toddler & preschool language development is crucial to later literacy skill development

Bilingual & Bidialectal Semantic Development

During the period of transition, a bilingual child may use interlanguage, in which the grammar and pronunciation of L2 is influenced by L1. Differences frequently occur with morphological endings and short, unstressed words, such as auxiliary verbs, pronouns and prepositions. Example: The cat is behind the tree" is commonly said "The cat is in back of the tree" by Spanish bilingual children (Spanish: El gato esta detras del arbol."). AAE speaking children develop the ability to shift between AAE and mainstream dialect as early as preschool (McDonald, Connor & Craig, 2006). Important to keep in mind that even with high dialect density, average AAE speaker demonstrates features in 20% of words overall (Craig & Washington, 2002).

Written Narratives

Early written narratives (much like early oral narratives) lack cohesion and use structures repeatedly. Drawing often used to highlight portions of the story and organize early text; followed by use of essays and reports with clear text forms (e.g., the 5 paragraph essay with main idea, the letter to a friend, etc.) By middle school, written narratives increase in length and diversity with advanced expository text and clear narrative elements of story grammar.

School-Age Development: Broad Strokes

Expressive vocabulary in 1st grade is approx. 2,600with comprehension for as many as 10,000, including multiple word meanings. An early school child can tell stories and use humor Cognitive skills develop throughout the school years, with the brain reaching nearly adult size by age 8 - growth that is reflected in increasing skills for abstract problem solving and thought processes. Morphosyntactic rules stabilize and refine, allowing for a reduction in redundancy in a child's spoken language (e.g., fewer double negatives, more referent pronouns)

Negative-Sentence Form

Five adult forms of the negative exist in English. 1.Not and -n't attached to the verb 2.Negative words, such as nobody and nothing 3.The determiner no used before nouns or noun-like words, as in "No cookies for you" 4.Negative adverbs, such as never and nowhere 5.Negative prefixes, such as un-, dis- and non-

Genderlect The collective stylistic characteristics of men & women.

In preadolescence and adolescence, both girls and boys posture and counter posture with their language in a sense of competition, using verbal aggression (e.g., jokes, put-downs, insults, etc). This is used to hold attention, assert dominance and sometimes, bully.

Summary:

In school-age children, narratives develop internally, seen with the emergence of story grammar. Noun and verb phrases become longer and more complex. Metalinguistic abilities develop slowly, in response to educational environments.

Gender Differences

In the early elementary school years, children's language reflect gender differences seen in masculine/feminine adults. These include differences in articulation, semantics(vocabulary) and conversational pragmatics. Articulation: 'forward' production phonemes: /f, s, ʃ, θ/ in many feminine people; A good example of how articulation changes based on gender presentation/performance can be seen in this video of transgender woman talking about their transition process as it relates to their voice) Conversation: interruption by others when you are talking is frequently considered enthusiastic participation by many women, but bossy or pushiness by men. Vocabulary: Greater number of descriptors used by more feminine people, including adjectives, (e.g., adorable, lovely), color terms (e.g., fuschia, chartreuse), and emphatic expressions even seen in texting language (e.g., more consonants in women, such as omgggg, yayyyy). However, in assertive situations, these are also rarely produced by women.

Adolescence

Increased complexity of noun phrases (Ravid, 2006) Vocabulary growth in abstract and categorical nouns •conclusion, opinion, justice, mammal, vertebrate, legume. Linking sentences with adverbial conjuncts and disjuncts Adverbial Conjuncts are connective. •Similarly... Moreover...In addition... Consequently...Adverbial Disjuncts are contrastive. •On the other hand...Rather... Nevertheless... Still... To be honest... Yet...

Loss of inhibitory control

Inhibition is an executive function that helps us resist automated responses to stimuli. •Inhibitory control of attention helps us focus •Inhibitory control of behavior - avoid impulsive activities, like petting a service dog. •Cognitive inhibition - limits extraneous thoughts, deletes irrelevant info from STM. Inhibition plays an important role in language Lexical competition, focusing attention on conversation, waiting your turn, Supported by older adults tendency to be off topic Older adults do worse on go/no-go tasks

Preschool Semantic Development: Relational Terms

Interrogatives 1.What, Where 2.Who, whose, which 3.When, how, whyWhen children don't understand a question, they answer on the basis of the verb. Example: "When are you going to eat?" "A cookie!" Temporal Relations (in order of acquisition) 1.Order - "before", "after" 2.Duration - "since", "until" 3.Simultaneity - "while", "at the same time as" Before children understand these concepts above, they just interpret sentences in the order of mention, regardless of temporal markers. Example: Before you go to school, eat your breakfast. (Child will think 1st: school, then 2nd: breakfast). Locational Prepositions - comprehension first appears at age 2, with in& on, tobut often only in relation to objects present (e.g., container, = something belongs inside it For some children, this a major part of their treatment program as part of a "following multi-step directions" goal (1:30). Physical Relations - some patterns that have been noted here is that children first learn opposite terms, and also the positive member within physical relationships (e.g., big/little, long/short) Kinship Terms - mother, father, sister, brother learned first; all major kinship terms understood by age 10

When does writing get hard?

Just like reading, when one aspect is especially stressed, others deteriorate (e.g., when you have a difficult topic to write about, spelling and written language accuracy decreases) Text Generation - representing absent events and entities, describing internal states, thoughts, and feelings of characters can occur by age 4 with ORALnarratives (later to become written). Text generation starts as a single sentence (e.g.,tuda is my birfda) and expands to include commentary (e.g.,I lik my birfda pezets. I eat cak.)

Tools for understanding language development

Let's talk about sentence complexity. First the Complexity/ Subordination index (SI), promoted by SALT. Secondly, Mean Length of Utterance in Words (MLUw), which measures productivity. We use these to: 1.Establish and monitor syntactic complexity and productivity (i.e., length) 2.Understand difference in quality between a written and spoken language language sample from the same person 3.Monitor change in development over time

Reading Development

Literacy: The use of visual modes of communication (reading and writing) Mature Literacy Mature, neurotypical readers use very little cognitive energy in determining word pronunciation Language and experience are used to understand the text, which is monitored to ensure the information makes sense Prediction of the next word or phrase aids quick processing Reading is interactive and one of the ways adults increase vocabulary and knowledge

How and when do we use these measures?

Longer, natural samples of spontaneous language with peers Longer, spontaneous language samples during play Picture descriptions Personal recounts and accounts Story tells and retells

Dedifferentiation hypothesis

Loss of cerebral specialization in brains of the elderly. Activation in the brains of the elderly is more diffuse bilaterally than in the young. It takes activation in more brain regions to get the same task done in older adults(Logan et al., 2002)

Narrative Analysis

Macrostructure - measures the basic structures in place (e.g., narrative shape);Measurement tools include: Applebee's stages of narrative maturity, and episodic analysis of story grammar, and/or high point analysis (if it is a personal experience), etc. Microstructure - measures the elements present that create cohesion & coherence (e.g., form and content); Measurement tools include: MLUm/w, TTR (NDW and NTW), % grammaticality, dialectal density measures, etc.

How Genderlect Patterns Inform Our Stereotypes about Language

Men see their role in conversations as information providers.- often look around the room- make more fleeting eye contact- talk maintains status/independence- interruptions maintain assertions- topics rarely involve personal feelings (Associated Stereotype: Mansplaining) Women see their role in conversations as conversation facilitators- face their partners - give vocal or verbal feedback- ask more questions- finish the listener's thought - less difficulty finding new topics to discuss (Associated Stereotype: Overly Apologetic)

Conversational Partners & Gender

Men talk more in public and less at home Women talk more at home and less in public. Per one study, the most frequent reason for divorce given by women in heterosexual relationships the US is lack of communication between partners. How is this informed by genderlect? Research has found that men and women see their job in a conversation as being entirely different.

School-age Morphological Development

Morphological development in the school-age years is defined by increasing length and complexity of NPs and VPs, with increasing mastery of pronouns, pre- and suffixes, and irregular verb development.

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. 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 bath); this familiar sequence of events is the script. Narratives rely on: 1.Centering - the entities that form a story nucleus. 2.Chaining - the sequence of events that share attributes and lead from one action to the other

School Age Story Grammar Development

Narratives are organized in predictable, rule-governed ways that differ with culture. These components and rules are collectively called a story grammar, which is the narrative framework or internal structure of a story. A story grammar in English (and most Western languages) consists of the setting plus the episode structure (story grammar = setting + episode structure).Stories begin with introduction that contain a: 1.A setting statement (S) ...and an episode consists of: 2.An initiating event (IE) 3.An internal response (IR) 4.A plan (P) 5.An attempt (A) 6.A direct consequence (DC) 7.A reaction (R) 50% of Kindergartners can retell narratives with well-formed episodes, and this increases to 78% by 6th grade. Episodes are linked additively (using and), temporally (using and then, next) and/or causally (using because). Increasing use of dialogue in stories are notable during school-age story development.

Naming

Older adults have more retrieval failures and errors. Naming performance declines about 2% per decade (Connor et al. 2004) Increased dependence on indefinite language and fillers •Thing, stuff, kind of like, you know what I mean •The text attributes this to working memory deficits, but it could be general slowing of language processing.

Compensation hypothesis

Older brains recruit additional neural resources to maintain performance. This distracts these areas from their normal function. Example, frontal lobe recruited for sensory processing limits its ability to help with executive function (Cabeza et al., 2002)

Discourse

Older narratives are less organized (Owens, ed., 2016) •More fillers •Irrelevant details •At times rambling Discourse comprehension for specific details may suffer when memory demands are high. •Fast speech, distractors, noisy environment. •The ability to retain the situation-based information (i.e. the gist) is retained (Ferstl, 2001) •Apparent as early as middle age.

Emergent Literacy Skills

Phonological Awareness Knowledge of sounds/syllables and the sound structure of words Phonemic awareness: The ability to manipulate sounds, such as blendingor segmenting Related to reading skills and is the best predictor of spelling ability in early elementary Ability to determine a word when a phoneme or syllable is deleted, to blend or create a word from individual sounds and syllables, and to compare initial phonemes"/k/- /æ/-/t/. What word is that?""What sounds are in 'cat'?"BlendingSegmenting Reading Development Through the Lifespan Reading development begins around age 1 when books are shared with toddlers Dialogic reading Print awareness Children with good language seem to enjoy reading and pretend to read By age 4, children notice phonological similarities and syllable structure; may find rhyming funny Preschool teachers are often trained in emergent literacy Five kindergarten variables that predict reading success by 2nd grade: 1.letter identification 2.sentence imitation 3.phonological awareness 4.rapid automatized naming 5.maternal education Phonics: Sound-letter correspondence By 3rd grade, there is a shift from learning to read to reading to learn

Phonology

Phonological knowledge base is multidimensional in adults. •higher-level phonological categories •social-indexical knowledge •Places in social groups, gender, dialect, sexual orientation. •Some changes to speech sound production occur, likely due to neuromuscular changes. •Longer vowels, increased silent intervals in stops, shorter VOT (Benjamin, 1982).

Preschool Syntax Development: Phrases

Phrase - a group of words that functions as a single distinct syntactic unit that is less than a sentence. Noun Phrase (NP) - act as a noun or serve the function of a noun; modifiers include initiator, determiner, adjective, noun + post-noun modifier (see p. 261 for chart). By 3 y/o - children understand pre-noun adjectives (e.g., A bigdog) but not post-noun modifiers (e.g., A big dog in the car); first post-noun modifiers appear as adverbs around this age (e.g., "the dog there/here") By 4 y/o - quantifiers, demonstratives, post-noun prepositional phrases added (Owens, 2013). Children tend to acquire articles with singular nouns before using with mass nouns. A cat / The dog at approx. 3 y/o Some water / Any sand at approx. 4 y/o Verb Phrase(VP) - containing a verb (existence, action or occurrence) and expressing something about people, things, places, and events (see table p. 263 on Elements of VP). English contains approx. 200 irregular past tense verbs, several of which are learned in preschool years. By age 2, many children use came, fell, broke, sat, and went in single word utterances. Use of auxiliary verbs (i.e., 'helping' verbs) such as can, do and will/wouldfirst appear as a negative form at approx. 2 ½ y/o (e.g., "I won't!") but masterful use of auxiliary verbs doesn't develop until used in the positive form (e.g., "He will go running."). Tense (which relates the speech time to the event reference time) and aspect (which concerns the event relative to its completion, repetition or duration) are intertwined in English language forms. In general, between 3-3 ½ y/o, children gain a sense of reference other than the present. The use of to be as a main verb (i.e., as a copula) in present and past tense sentences such as: I amsick They are late He wasrunning They werehappy...is often not fully mastered until around age 4, because it takes time to sort the copular variations for person and number (am, is, are) and tense (was, were, will be, been). Prepositional phrases commonly first appear at the end of the phrase. (Ex. Mommy, put in.) By age 3, most children can talk about location in utterances/events with 3 elements (Ex. Mommy put cereal in my bowl; 3 elements being mommy, cereal and bowl) By age 3, infinitive phrases are being formed with words such as wanna, gonna, gotta, hafta preceding the verb, in a I + present tense verb construction (e.g., I gotta eat).

Spelling Development

Preliterate 'spelling': Scribbles with an occasional letter (Henderson, 1990) Following knowledge of alphabetic system: 'Invented Spelling'- where letter names are used in spelling (e.g., escape SKP, elephant LFN) or using one letter to represent several (e.g., Street set) Phonemic Spelling - later phase of invented spelling; correspondence of sound and symbol is transparent, with some memorized formsEx. HE HAD A BLUE CLTH. IT TRD IN TO A BRD.(He had a blue cloth. It turned into a bird.) Invented spelling demonstrates an analytical approach, which facilitates the integration of phonological and orthographic knowledge, which in turn, facilitates reading development (Ouellette & Sénéchal, 2008a-b) TL;DR - The errors are A GOOD THING.

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.

Interrogative Question Forms

Question forms change as the child's language develops. Tag questions has 3 phases of development: 1.Simple tags - "I do this, okay?" 2.Truer tags - "You don't like cookies, do you?" 3.Mature tags - after 5 y/o; "This one is ugly, isn't it?"

Atypical changes to communication

Semantic breakdowns - SD •Problems identifying objects functions and relationships •Excessive word retrieval failures Episodic memory breakdowns - AD •Loss of memories of temporally sequenced events (not semantic or procedural) •Accelerated rates of forgetting Attention and executive function breakdowns - FTD, Vasc. D, AD •Poor thought organization and self monitoring •Fluent but empty speech lacks information content •Need for frequent redirection, high distractibility •Impulsive behavior, disinhibited speech.

Patterns of preschool sentence form development:

Sentences early on are filled with disruptions, repetitions, revisions and false starts - this indicates these sentences are at the emergent in the child's language (Rispoli & Hadley, 2001). Disruption and revision increases as a child's language develops (Rispoli, 2003). Syntactic acquisition in preschool years is facilitated by practice and increased language input of complex sentences(Keren-Portnoy, 2006; Huttenlocher et al., 2002)

Chall's Stages of Reading - Stage 0

Stage 0 Birth until the beginning of 1st gradePre-requisites for acquiring reading: Knowing the letters of the alphabet Gaining phonemic awareness(knowledge of the individual sounds within words.)

Chall's Stages of Reading - Stage 1

Stage 1 1st and 2nd gradesAcquire phonological decoding and recoding skills Ability to translate letters into sounds and blend sounds into words - "sounding out" words.Children with greater phonemic awareness tend to read more, and more time-on-task increases a child's phonemic awareness.

Chall's Stages of Reading - Stage 2

Stage 2 2nd and 3rd grades Children gain fluency in reading simple material Words can be retrieved via two-routes: Phonological recoding - converting visual form of word into a speech-like form that can be used to access meaning. Visually based retrieval - access meaning directly from its visual form (i.e., whole word reading, sight reading).

Chall's Stages of Reading - Stage 3

Stage 3 4th through 8th grades Children able to draw knowledge from text"In the primary grades, children learn to read; in the higher grades, they read to learn."

Chall's Stages of Reading - Stage 4

Stage 4 8th through 12th grades Adolescents acquire skills not only to pull information from text representing one perspective but can coordinate multiple perspectives. They are exposed to these multiple perspective through plays, poetry & sophisticated novels.

Preschool Development

The average monolingual Mainstream American English (MAE) 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

Language throughout the lifespan

The language system is "mature" around age 25. Refinement continues throughout the lifespan. Around middle age, certain aspects of language start to change Some aspects just change while others decline.

Theory of Mind

Theory of mind (ToM) begins at the development of joint attention/reference and continues to develop throughout childhood and adolescence. (In this experiment, children are compared at 14 and 18 months, to see when they start to understand that someone may have a different perspective than they do.) Communicative abilities are closely tied with ToM development, because they often require a consideration of mental states (Astington, 2003; Lohmann & Tomasello, 2003).

Retrieval failures

Tip of the tongue errors = most common •"I had it but I lost it..... I think it starts with a B" •Semantics is activated, but fails to connect with the lexical entry and phonology. •More problems with proper names. •More problems with words we don't use as often (Vitevitch & Sommers, 2003).

Topic Maintenance

Topic - the content about which we 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., 1 question, 1 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.

Sentence Measures

Utterance Length Measure: Mean Length of Utterance in Words# of total words / # total utterances = Avg. # words per utterance Findings compared against Rice et al, 2010 norms (relevant chart in next slide)Clausal Density Measure: Complexity/Subordination Index# of total clauses / # of total utterances = Avg. utterance complexity Findings compared against ENNI norms.*Like all norms, these should be interpreted with caution due to individual and cultural differences of development.

Intentions

Wells (1985) broadly defined 6 pragmatic intentions to children's early utterances, which stabilize throughout the rest of the preschool period. •The wantingfunction that dominated toddler language decreases, and requestingfunction 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?").

School-Age Pragmatic Development

What makes classroom language skills different?1.Turn-taking must be negotiated with the teacher using a specific behavior 2.Ideational language (usually regarding a text or assignment) prevails over interpersonal language 3.Child is held accountable for the precision of their response (i.e., word meanings, accuracy) 4.Demands for nonegocentrism and decentrismincrease Nonegocentrism - the ability to take the perspective of another person (i.e., advancing theory of mind skills) Decentration - the process of moving from rigid, one-dimensional descriptions of objects/events to coordinated, multi-attributional ones Both skills develop and are demonstrated in how childrenlearn to consider their audience, provide background informationandincrease their accuracy of abstract information.

Subordinate Clause Development

When sentences contain more than one clause, they are considered complex sentences. Subordinate clauses combine clauses in a certain way that forms a complex sentence. In preschool children, we generally see 2 types of subordinate clauses: 1. Object-noun-phrase complements (3 y/o)I know that you can do it.I think that I like to sew. 2. Relative clause embedding (appearing first at the end of a sentence)Here's the[X] that [verbs]That's the [X] that [verb-s]The main clause introduces a new topic using Here/That + is. Many early relative clauses modify empty or nonspecific nouns. Example: "This is the one (that) I want" or "Here is the way (that) I do it." Key words used in embedded clauses: 1.Connective Wh-words 2.Relative pronouns Connective Wh-words which are first learned in non-connective contexts are later used to join clauses (e.g., what, where, when). Most preschool errors involve use of the wrong relative pronoun (McKee, McDaniel, & Snedeker, p. 587)Examples: The potato what she's rolling. Those plates why the elephants are eating them. The chairs who are flying. One exception is when, which develops as a connector before it develops in non-connective concepts (e.g., "I don't know when he left" before "When did he leave?" At first, a preschool child needs relative pronouns(e.g., that) to interpret a sentence but by age 4, can comprehend and start to produce the omission: Example: This is the candy that Hasan likes. This is the candy Hasan likes.

Narratives Across Cultures

While storytelling is universal, the manner in which they are told varies between cultures (McGregor, 2000). Themes also vary: American literary narratives: individualism through character's increasing autonomy and personal perspective; often overcoming odds Mexican, Caribbean, Central & South American literary narratives: collectivism and family Chinese literary narratives: proper social interactions, morals and authority

School-age Semantic Development

While the number of lexical items (i.e., vocabulary) grows exponentially in the school-age years, children's development of semantic understanding is what builds conceptual depth. This is seen the development of definitional skills - the ability to provide definitions of words - which matures as a child shifts in their definition of concepts from definitions based on personal experience to more socially shared meanings. Overall, precise semantic content seems to develop prior to accurate syntax when providing a definition (Johnson & Anglin, 1995).

Writing Development

Writing development relies on many interdependent processes: 1.Visual integration of graphemes to phonology and morphology 2.Memory - spelling requires extractions from LTM, STM, and analogies to known words 3.Executive function (more at first, less later) 4.Fine motor skills (usually hand movements) Emerging Writing 3 y/o - children 'write' with no awareness of sound representation 4 y/o - real letters included in their writing + some common sight words + drawings begins their communication of information in written form 5 y/o - children learn alphabetic system and apply several strategies in learning to spell, which expends a large amount of cognitive energy to start Understanding the early stages of writing requires the consideration of:-Directionality-Stringing-Spacing-Symbols Mental graphemic representation (MGR) - A clear, complete image of a written word, containing all letters, some letters, or word partsex. cat cat, personnel prsnl, recycling re 1.pre-school + kindergarten-age children are learning this as they learn to spell 2.some orthographic regularities may already be in place 3.consonants generally develop prior to vowels

Semantics

•As world knowledge from experience grows, so do semantic networks. •This is true both in size (vocabulary) and complexity. •More connections •Various types of relationships •Associative vs taxonomic. •This makes new word learning easier •Improved generation of word definitions

reading

•Decoding: Segmenting a word and blending the sounds together to form a word •Phonological skills are essential for decoding •Syntax, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics are needed for comprehension •Reader uses language and experience to interpret the message Morphological Awareness By 10 years of age, awareness of and knowledge about the morphological structure of words is a better predictor of decoding ability Morphological complexity of words increases as children progress into middle school

Age-related changes to the language system

•Most adults experience some cognitive changes as they age. •Usually processing speed •Imagery in movies and books often confound typical changes to communication with dementia.

Aspects that change or decline with age

•Naming•Discourse•Attention•Memory•Executive function

Hearing Loss

•Normal age-related hearing loss affects high frequencies •Successful perception in the setting of poor auditory acuity could occur at the cost of other cognitive functions (limited resources). •Modest declines in hearing have negative impacts on memory and comprehension (Wingfield et al. 2005)

Loss of processing speed

•There is a generalized slowing of all cognitive and perceptual processing with age (Salthouse, 1996). •Slowed processing becomes problematic in time-pressured activities. •Processing that can't be completed online has to be completed on memory traces. •This compounds as you move from words to sentences to discourse.

What causes age-related communication changes?

•We don't know. •Probably a genetic predisposition + environmental factors •The actual mechanism is up for debate. •There are several hypotheses on the cause: •Loss of processing speed •De-differentiation •Loss of specialization •Loss of inhibitory control