Language
A socially shared code that uses a conventional system of arbitrary symbols to represent ideas about the world that are meaningful to others who know the same code
Four characteristics of language
1. socially shared
2. a code that uses a system of
arbitrary symbols
3. code that is conventional
4. a representational tool
Speech
a voluntary neuromuscular behavior that allows humans to express language and is essential for spoken communication.
4 systems of speech
1. respiration
2. phonation
3. articulation
4. resonance
Hearing
the perception of sound
-auditory perception and speech perception
Communication
the sharing of information among two or more persons,
" the transmission of thoughts or feelings from the mind of a speaker to the mind of a listener
For communication to occur it must involve a...
sender and receiver
Seven communication purposes
1. Instrumental- used to ask for something
2. Regulatory- give or get directions
3. Interactional-interact or converse socially
4. Personal-express state-of-mind, or feelings
5. Heuristic-find out information or inquire
6. Imaginative-tell stories and rol
Major domains of language
form. content, use
Form
Syntax
Morphology
Phonology
syntax
Rules of language governing the internal
organization of sentences
morphology
Rules of language governing the internal organization of words
phonology
Rules of language governing the sounds used to make syllables and words
Content
Semantics
semantics
Rules of language governing the meaning of individual words and word combinations
Use
Pragmatics
pragmatics
Rules of language governing how language is used for social purposes
-Communication intention:using language for different functions
-Language for discourse: conversation
-Knowing what to say and when to say it-social conventions
Remarkable features of language
-Acquisition rate
-Universality
-Species specificity
-Semanticity
-Productivity
Major areas of study
1. Speech Perception
2. Language Production
3. Language Comprehension
Speech Perception
studies help researchers learn about the kinds of language abilities infants have when they are born and how children use their speech perception to learn language.
1. High-Amplitude Non-Nutritive Sucking Procedure
2. Head-Turn Preference Procedure
3. Bra
Head-Turn Preference Procedure
...
Brain imaging technologies
...
High-Amplitude Non-Nutritive Sucking Procedure
...
Language Production
studies help inform practitioners of children's ability to use language expressively. Specifically researchers examine children's emergent form, content, and use capabilities.
-also known as expressive language.
1. Normative research
2. Observational rese
Normative research
produces milestone information.
Observational research
produces information about factors that may be
involved in the development of language production.
Experimental research
produced information regarding how context or conditions can influence language production.
Language Comprehension
studies examine what children understand about language, even if they cannot express what they know.
-also known as receptive language.
Major Developmental Theories
Nurture Inspired Theories
Nature Inspired Theories
Nurture Inspired Theories
also called empiricist theories, rest on the notion that humans gain all knowledge through experiences.
-Behaviorist Theory
-Social-Interactionist Theory
-Cognitive Theory
-Intentionality Model
-Competition Model
-Usage-based Theory
Behaviorist Theory
(Skinner)- language is learned through operant conditioning and shaping. Good behaviors are reinforced, while bad ones are suppressed.
Social-Interactionist Theory
(Vygotsky)- language emerges through social interaction with peers and adults. Children have a Zone of Proximal Development, in which they learn language skills with the assistance of individuals with higher level language skills than their own
Cognitive Theory
(Piaget)- Children's cognitive development precedes their language development. Children's language begin as egocentric and then progress once they are cognitively able to understand the perspectives of others
Intentionality Model
(Bloom)-the tension between the desire to communicate intentions and the effort required to communicate these intensions drive language development.
Competition Model
(MacWhinney)- repeated exposure to reliable language input strengthens children's "correct" representations of the morphology, phonology, and syntax of their language.
Usage-based Theory
(Tomasello)-children attend to and understand other people's intentions and then imitate other persons' intentional communicative actions to learn language.
Nature Inspired Theories
also called nativist theories, generally hold that much knowledge is innate and genetically transmitted rather than
learned by experience.
-Modularity Theory
-Universal Grammar
-Syntactic Bootstrapping
-Semantic Bootstrapping
-Connectionist Theory
Modularity Theory
(Fodor)- language is organized in highly specific modules of the brain. Language modules perform dedicated functions but can interact with one another to produce combinations of functions
Universal Grammar
(Chomsky)- Children are born with general grammatical rules and categories common to all languages. Children use input to discover the parameters of their language uses
Syntactic Bootstrapping
(Gleitman)- Children use their knowledge of syntactic categories to make inferences about the meanings of new word
Semantic Bootstrapping
(Pinker)- Children use their knowledge of word meanings to make inferences about syntactic categories to which the word belong
Connectionist Theory
(Rumelhart & McClelland)- language is organized in a network containing nodes and connections. The network of nodes and connections undergoes constant transformation in response to language input.
Semantic development
an individuals learning and storage of the meaning of words.
Semantic Development: Three major tasks for the language learner
1. Acquiring a mental lexicon of 60,000 words between infancy and adulthood
2. Learning new words rapidly
3. Organizing the mental lexicon in an efficient semantic network
Mental lexicon
refers to an individuals receptive and expressive lexicon.
-Typically receptive lexicons are larger than expressive.
-Estimates of children's lexicons suggest that it's volume increases dramatically during the first several years of life
(12 months=only s
Semantic taxonomy
looks beyond the size of one's lexicon and differentiates the individual words based on their semantic role.
-differentiates children's lexical items into 5 categories:
1. Specific nominals
2. General nominals
3. Action nominals
4. Modifiers
5. Personal-s
Specific nominals
refers to specific objects
General nominals
refers to all members of a category
Action nominals
describes specific actions
Modifiers
describes properties and qualities
Personal-social words
describe affective states and relationships
Early lexicons (the first 50 words)
Typically contain at least one word from each category and on average is comprised of:
- 51%-general nominals
- 14%-specific nominals
- 13%-action words
- 9%-personal-social words
- 8%-modifiers
The process children use to learn new words is usually:
1. Exposure to a novel word
2. Acquire general understanding of it's meaning
3. Begins to express the new word, however may use it incorrectly at first (fragile state)
4. Eventually acquires a deepened flexible understanding of the word
A deepened-flexible understanding of the word is influenced by a number of factors, such as:
1. Concept represented by the word- concrete words vs. abstractions
2. Phonological form of the word- words with phonologically transparent relationships vs. conventional labels, and common sound sequences vs. rare sound sequences
3. Contextual conditions
Ostentive word learning
a great deal of contextual (linguistic or extralinguistic) information is provided about a novel word
Nonostentive word learning
little contextual information (linguistic or extralinguistic) is provided about the novel word
Children refine their knowledge of the meaning of words through repeated exposure to the word in different contexts
...
Influences on Semantic Development: Gender
Research suggests that in the first several years of language development girls usually have larger vocabularies and learn words easier than boys most likely due to:
-Biological factors: girls neurological development is faster than boys
-Psychological fa
Influences on Semantic Development: Language Impairment
Research suggests children with language impairment acquire words at a slower rate then typically developing peers due to a variety of factors specific to the individuals overall impairments.
Influences on Semantic Development: Language exposure
Research suggests a significant relationship between the number and types of words children hear in their environment and the size of their vocabularies.
Morphological Development
the internalization of the rules of language that govern word structure.
Morphemes
the smallest meaningful units of language
-Many words comprise a combination of these
-two types: grammatical and derivational
-free or bound
Grammatical (inflectional) morphemes
-Children's earliest words and sentences contain few grammatical morphemes for the first couple years.
-Around age two children begin using the present progressive -ing and a developmental trend of acquisition follows for a variety of other grammatical mo
grammatical morpheme examples
include free and bound morphemes such as: plural -s, possessive 's, past tense -ed, present progressive -ing and prepositions in and on, etc.
Derivational morphemes
morphemes (prefixes and suffixes) added to root words to change their syntactic class and semantic meaning.
-Development of these is essential for adding precision to a person's lexical base.
Free morphemes
able to stand alone
Bound morphemes
must be attached to other morphemes
Influences on Morphological Development: Second language acquisition
individuals learning a second language that differs considerably in its grammatical morphology from their native language will have an incredible difficult time mastering the morphology of the second language. Age of acquisition can be a factor.
Influences on Morphological Development: Dialect
dialectical differences within one language can vary in their morphological rules and create difficulty with proper morphological use when code switching between the dialect and the standard form of the language.
Influences on Morphological Development: Language Impairment
Children with language impairment will have increased difficulty learning the morphological rules of a language when compared to their typically developing peers.
Syntactic Development
the internalization of the rules of a language that govern how words are organized into sentences
-they exhibit 3 major achievements:
1. An increase in utterance length
2. Use of different sentence modalities
3. Development of complex syntax
utterance length
-Between the ages of 1 and 6 utterance length evolves immensely from single word utterances to utterance lengths that mirror those of an adult.
-The increase in utterance length reflects the children's ability to chain together morphemes to produce an inf
Sentence Modalities
Once children begin to use longer utterances they can produce sentences of various types (or modalities). The difference in sentence types depends on how the words are grammatically organized at a surface level.
Declaratives
make a statement. Often use six organizational schemes:
1. Subject + verb
2. Subject + verb + object
3. Subject + verb + complement
4. Subject + verb + adverb phrase
5. Subject + verb + indirect object + direct object
6. Subject + verb + direct object + i
Negatives
express negation and are often times learned early on. Rely on such words as no, not, cant, don't, won't, etc.
-Development follows a predictable order starting with :
1. Placing no at the beginning of a sentence
2. Placing the negative word within the se
Interogatives
involve the act of organizing syntax to form questions.
-Children develop the skill of formulating question early in life as means
of acquiring information form others.
two major question types
1. wh- questions
2. yes-no questions
Influences on Syntactic Development: Exposure to complex Syntax
All children, for the most part are exposed to simple syntactic structures beginning early in language development, however children who are exposed to more complex sentence structures show increased use of complex syntax than children without that exposu
Influences on Syntactic Development: Language impairment
children with language impairment can have a difficult time with syntactic comprehension and production. Syntactic mastery is dependent on vocabulary and morphological acquisition, children who are challenged in one or both of these areas will have increa
Phonological development
involves acquiring the rules of language that govern the sound structures of syllables and words
1. Developing an internal representation of each phoneme in their native language.
2. Understanding how these phonemes can be arranged in words (phonotactic
r
three key building blocks in phonological development
1. Using cues to segment streams of speech
2. Developing a phonemic inventory
3. Becoming phonologically aware
Cues to Segment Streams of Speech
-Infants have to acquire the skill of parsing the streams of speech early on.
-Prosodic cues and phonotactic cues are strategies infants use to parse speech.
Prosodic cues
Infants use their familiarity of words and syllable stress patterns, or the rhythm of language to break apart the speech stream.
Phonotactic cues
Early in development infants become sensitive to the probability that certain words will occur both in general and in specific positions of syllables and words. The phonotactic probabilities and improbabilities help infants segment words from a continuous
Phonemic Inventory
includes vowels and consonants.
-typically develop in an age related sequence, influences by the frequency with which the phonemes occur in the child's language as well as overall articulatory abilities of the child.
Phonological knowledge
-Children must acquire phonological knowledge of the internal representations of phonemes composing his/her language.
-Children must also master phonological production or the expressive use of the phonemes in syllables and words.
-Phonological knowledge
Phonological Awareness
-refers to an individual's awareness of the phonological structure, or sound structure, of spoken words.
- involves the detection and manipulation of sounds within syllables and words.
-for most children, it appears in the third year, with accelerating gr
Influences on Phonological Development
-Native Language
-Linguistic experience
Children's phonological development is heavily influenced by the phonemic composition of the language of which the children are exposed. Variability in the children's phonological exposure will directly impact their
Pragmatic Development
involves acquiring the rules of language that govern how language is used as a social tool.
-Skills involved include: Being able to enter and hold a conversation, taking into account the circumstances and goals of the participants in a conversation.
Pragmatic Building Blocks
1. Using language for different communication functions
2. Developing Conversation Skills
3. Gaining sensitivity to extralinguistic cues
Communication Functions
Mastery of a range of communication functions is the aspect of language that allows a person to use languages an instrument for adequately conveying his/her mental state to other people and to use language as a social interactional tool.
Several Basic communication functions
Instrumental
Regulatory
Interactional
Personal
Heuristic
Imaginative
Informative
Conversational Skills
Children must develop an understanding of a conversational scheme, or conversational framework, in order to establish successful conversational exchanges with other people.
-Children begin developing conversational schematic skills shortly after birth whe
Conversational schemas
-Initiation and establishment of a topic
-Navigation of a series of contingent turns that maintain or shift the topic
-Resolution and closure
Sensitivity to Extralinguistic Cues
-When using language for social interaction purposes, a variety of extralinguistic devices are used to aid communication such as: Posture, gesture, facial expression, eye contact, proximity, pitch, loudness, and pausing.
-Extralinguistic cues begin to dev
Influences on Pragmatic Development: Temperament
A child's temperament (shy vs. bold) may effect their acquisition of pragmatic skills as temperament often is associated with a child reticence to engage in communicative acts. The more a child engages in communicative acts the quicker they are able to pr
Influences on Pragmatic Development: Social and Cultural Contexts of development
children exhibit pragmatic skills that reflect the pragmatic rules of the larger community. If a specific pragmatic act is not acceptable in a specific language the mastery of that skill will be difficult to attain.
Language
A socially shared code that uses a conventional system of arbitrary symbols to represent ideas about the world that are meaningful to others who know the same code
Four characteristics of language
1. socially shared
2. a code that uses a system of
arbitrary symbols
3. code that is conventional
4. a representational tool
Speech
a voluntary neuromuscular behavior that allows humans to express language and is essential for spoken communication.
4 systems of speech
1. respiration
2. phonation
3. articulation
4. resonance
Hearing
the perception of sound
-auditory perception and speech perception
Communication
the sharing of information among two or more persons,
" the transmission of thoughts or feelings from the mind of a speaker to the mind of a listener
For communication to occur it must involve a...
sender and receiver
Seven communication purposes
1. Instrumental- used to ask for something
2. Regulatory- give or get directions
3. Interactional-interact or converse socially
4. Personal-express state-of-mind, or feelings
5. Heuristic-find out information or inquire
6. Imaginative-tell stories and rol
Major domains of language
form. content, use
Form
Syntax
Morphology
Phonology
syntax
Rules of language governing the internal
organization of sentences
morphology
Rules of language governing the internal organization of words
phonology
Rules of language governing the sounds used to make syllables and words
Content
Semantics
semantics
Rules of language governing the meaning of individual words and word combinations
Use
Pragmatics
pragmatics
Rules of language governing how language is used for social purposes
-Communication intention:using language for different functions
-Language for discourse: conversation
-Knowing what to say and when to say it-social conventions
Remarkable features of language
-Acquisition rate
-Universality
-Species specificity
-Semanticity
-Productivity
Major areas of study
1. Speech Perception
2. Language Production
3. Language Comprehension
Speech Perception
studies help researchers learn about the kinds of language abilities infants have when they are born and how children use their speech perception to learn language.
1. High-Amplitude Non-Nutritive Sucking Procedure
2. Head-Turn Preference Procedure
3. Bra
Head-Turn Preference Procedure
...
Brain imaging technologies
...
High-Amplitude Non-Nutritive Sucking Procedure
...
Language Production
studies help inform practitioners of children's ability to use language expressively. Specifically researchers examine children's emergent form, content, and use capabilities.
-also known as expressive language.
1. Normative research
2. Observational rese
Normative research
produces milestone information.
Observational research
produces information about factors that may be
involved in the development of language production.
Experimental research
produced information regarding how context or conditions can influence language production.
Language Comprehension
studies examine what children understand about language, even if they cannot express what they know.
-also known as receptive language.
Major Developmental Theories
Nurture Inspired Theories
Nature Inspired Theories
Nurture Inspired Theories
also called empiricist theories, rest on the notion that humans gain all knowledge through experiences.
-Behaviorist Theory
-Social-Interactionist Theory
-Cognitive Theory
-Intentionality Model
-Competition Model
-Usage-based Theory
Behaviorist Theory
(Skinner)- language is learned through operant conditioning and shaping. Good behaviors are reinforced, while bad ones are suppressed.
Social-Interactionist Theory
(Vygotsky)- language emerges through social interaction with peers and adults. Children have a Zone of Proximal Development, in which they learn language skills with the assistance of individuals with higher level language skills than their own
Cognitive Theory
(Piaget)- Children's cognitive development precedes their language development. Children's language begin as egocentric and then progress once they are cognitively able to understand the perspectives of others
Intentionality Model
(Bloom)-the tension between the desire to communicate intentions and the effort required to communicate these intensions drive language development.
Competition Model
(MacWhinney)- repeated exposure to reliable language input strengthens children's "correct" representations of the morphology, phonology, and syntax of their language.
Usage-based Theory
(Tomasello)-children attend to and understand other people's intentions and then imitate other persons' intentional communicative actions to learn language.
Nature Inspired Theories
also called nativist theories, generally hold that much knowledge is innate and genetically transmitted rather than
learned by experience.
-Modularity Theory
-Universal Grammar
-Syntactic Bootstrapping
-Semantic Bootstrapping
-Connectionist Theory
Modularity Theory
(Fodor)- language is organized in highly specific modules of the brain. Language modules perform dedicated functions but can interact with one another to produce combinations of functions
Universal Grammar
(Chomsky)- Children are born with general grammatical rules and categories common to all languages. Children use input to discover the parameters of their language uses
Syntactic Bootstrapping
(Gleitman)- Children use their knowledge of syntactic categories to make inferences about the meanings of new word
Semantic Bootstrapping
(Pinker)- Children use their knowledge of word meanings to make inferences about syntactic categories to which the word belong
Connectionist Theory
(Rumelhart & McClelland)- language is organized in a network containing nodes and connections. The network of nodes and connections undergoes constant transformation in response to language input.
Semantic development
an individuals learning and storage of the meaning of words.
Semantic Development: Three major tasks for the language learner
1. Acquiring a mental lexicon of 60,000 words between infancy and adulthood
2. Learning new words rapidly
3. Organizing the mental lexicon in an efficient semantic network
Mental lexicon
refers to an individuals receptive and expressive lexicon.
-Typically receptive lexicons are larger than expressive.
-Estimates of children's lexicons suggest that it's volume increases dramatically during the first several years of life
(12 months=only s
Semantic taxonomy
looks beyond the size of one's lexicon and differentiates the individual words based on their semantic role.
-differentiates children's lexical items into 5 categories:
1. Specific nominals
2. General nominals
3. Action nominals
4. Modifiers
5. Personal-s
Specific nominals
refers to specific objects
General nominals
refers to all members of a category
Action nominals
describes specific actions
Modifiers
describes properties and qualities
Personal-social words
describe affective states and relationships
Early lexicons (the first 50 words)
Typically contain at least one word from each category and on average is comprised of:
- 51%-general nominals
- 14%-specific nominals
- 13%-action words
- 9%-personal-social words
- 8%-modifiers
The process children use to learn new words is usually:
1. Exposure to a novel word
2. Acquire general understanding of it's meaning
3. Begins to express the new word, however may use it incorrectly at first (fragile state)
4. Eventually acquires a deepened flexible understanding of the word
A deepened-flexible understanding of the word is influenced by a number of factors, such as:
1. Concept represented by the word- concrete words vs. abstractions
2. Phonological form of the word- words with phonologically transparent relationships vs. conventional labels, and common sound sequences vs. rare sound sequences
3. Contextual conditions
Ostentive word learning
a great deal of contextual (linguistic or extralinguistic) information is provided about a novel word
Nonostentive word learning
little contextual information (linguistic or extralinguistic) is provided about the novel word
Children refine their knowledge of the meaning of words through repeated exposure to the word in different contexts
...
Influences on Semantic Development: Gender
Research suggests that in the first several years of language development girls usually have larger vocabularies and learn words easier than boys most likely due to:
-Biological factors: girls neurological development is faster than boys
-Psychological fa
Influences on Semantic Development: Language Impairment
Research suggests children with language impairment acquire words at a slower rate then typically developing peers due to a variety of factors specific to the individuals overall impairments.
Influences on Semantic Development: Language exposure
Research suggests a significant relationship between the number and types of words children hear in their environment and the size of their vocabularies.
Morphological Development
the internalization of the rules of language that govern word structure.
Morphemes
the smallest meaningful units of language
-Many words comprise a combination of these
-two types: grammatical and derivational
-free or bound
Grammatical (inflectional) morphemes
-Children's earliest words and sentences contain few grammatical morphemes for the first couple years.
-Around age two children begin using the present progressive -ing and a developmental trend of acquisition follows for a variety of other grammatical mo
grammatical morpheme examples
include free and bound morphemes such as: plural -s, possessive 's, past tense -ed, present progressive -ing and prepositions in and on, etc.
Derivational morphemes
morphemes (prefixes and suffixes) added to root words to change their syntactic class and semantic meaning.
-Development of these is essential for adding precision to a person's lexical base.
Free morphemes
able to stand alone
Bound morphemes
must be attached to other morphemes
Influences on Morphological Development: Second language acquisition
individuals learning a second language that differs considerably in its grammatical morphology from their native language will have an incredible difficult time mastering the morphology of the second language. Age of acquisition can be a factor.
Influences on Morphological Development: Dialect
dialectical differences within one language can vary in their morphological rules and create difficulty with proper morphological use when code switching between the dialect and the standard form of the language.
Influences on Morphological Development: Language Impairment
Children with language impairment will have increased difficulty learning the morphological rules of a language when compared to their typically developing peers.
Syntactic Development
the internalization of the rules of a language that govern how words are organized into sentences
-they exhibit 3 major achievements:
1. An increase in utterance length
2. Use of different sentence modalities
3. Development of complex syntax
utterance length
-Between the ages of 1 and 6 utterance length evolves immensely from single word utterances to utterance lengths that mirror those of an adult.
-The increase in utterance length reflects the children's ability to chain together morphemes to produce an inf
Sentence Modalities
Once children begin to use longer utterances they can produce sentences of various types (or modalities). The difference in sentence types depends on how the words are grammatically organized at a surface level.
Declaratives
make a statement. Often use six organizational schemes:
1. Subject + verb
2. Subject + verb + object
3. Subject + verb + complement
4. Subject + verb + adverb phrase
5. Subject + verb + indirect object + direct object
6. Subject + verb + direct object + i
Negatives
express negation and are often times learned early on. Rely on such words as no, not, cant, don't, won't, etc.
-Development follows a predictable order starting with :
1. Placing no at the beginning of a sentence
2. Placing the negative word within the se
Interogatives
involve the act of organizing syntax to form questions.
-Children develop the skill of formulating question early in life as means
of acquiring information form others.
two major question types
1. wh- questions
2. yes-no questions
Influences on Syntactic Development: Exposure to complex Syntax
All children, for the most part are exposed to simple syntactic structures beginning early in language development, however children who are exposed to more complex sentence structures show increased use of complex syntax than children without that exposu
Influences on Syntactic Development: Language impairment
children with language impairment can have a difficult time with syntactic comprehension and production. Syntactic mastery is dependent on vocabulary and morphological acquisition, children who are challenged in one or both of these areas will have increa
Phonological development
involves acquiring the rules of language that govern the sound structures of syllables and words
1. Developing an internal representation of each phoneme in their native language.
2. Understanding how these phonemes can be arranged in words (phonotactic
r
three key building blocks in phonological development
1. Using cues to segment streams of speech
2. Developing a phonemic inventory
3. Becoming phonologically aware
Cues to Segment Streams of Speech
-Infants have to acquire the skill of parsing the streams of speech early on.
-Prosodic cues and phonotactic cues are strategies infants use to parse speech.
Prosodic cues
Infants use their familiarity of words and syllable stress patterns, or the rhythm of language to break apart the speech stream.
Phonotactic cues
Early in development infants become sensitive to the probability that certain words will occur both in general and in specific positions of syllables and words. The phonotactic probabilities and improbabilities help infants segment words from a continuous
Phonemic Inventory
includes vowels and consonants.
-typically develop in an age related sequence, influences by the frequency with which the phonemes occur in the child's language as well as overall articulatory abilities of the child.
Phonological knowledge
-Children must acquire phonological knowledge of the internal representations of phonemes composing his/her language.
-Children must also master phonological production or the expressive use of the phonemes in syllables and words.
-Phonological knowledge
Phonological Awareness
-refers to an individual's awareness of the phonological structure, or sound structure, of spoken words.
- involves the detection and manipulation of sounds within syllables and words.
-for most children, it appears in the third year, with accelerating gr
Influences on Phonological Development
-Native Language
-Linguistic experience
Children's phonological development is heavily influenced by the phonemic composition of the language of which the children are exposed. Variability in the children's phonological exposure will directly impact their
Pragmatic Development
involves acquiring the rules of language that govern how language is used as a social tool.
-Skills involved include: Being able to enter and hold a conversation, taking into account the circumstances and goals of the participants in a conversation.
Pragmatic Building Blocks
1. Using language for different communication functions
2. Developing Conversation Skills
3. Gaining sensitivity to extralinguistic cues
Communication Functions
Mastery of a range of communication functions is the aspect of language that allows a person to use languages an instrument for adequately conveying his/her mental state to other people and to use language as a social interactional tool.
Several Basic communication functions
Instrumental
Regulatory
Interactional
Personal
Heuristic
Imaginative
Informative
Conversational Skills
Children must develop an understanding of a conversational scheme, or conversational framework, in order to establish successful conversational exchanges with other people.
-Children begin developing conversational schematic skills shortly after birth whe
Conversational schemas
-Initiation and establishment of a topic
-Navigation of a series of contingent turns that maintain or shift the topic
-Resolution and closure
Sensitivity to Extralinguistic Cues
-When using language for social interaction purposes, a variety of extralinguistic devices are used to aid communication such as: Posture, gesture, facial expression, eye contact, proximity, pitch, loudness, and pausing.
-Extralinguistic cues begin to dev
Influences on Pragmatic Development: Temperament
A child's temperament (shy vs. bold) may effect their acquisition of pragmatic skills as temperament often is associated with a child reticence to engage in communicative acts. The more a child engages in communicative acts the quicker they are able to pr
Influences on Pragmatic Development: Social and Cultural Contexts of development
children exhibit pragmatic skills that reflect the pragmatic rules of the larger community. If a specific pragmatic act is not acceptable in a specific language the mastery of that skill will be difficult to attain.