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Preschool development

Motor Development

Language Development

Walks / runs very well.

• Climbs stairs

• Balances on 1 foot

• Plays with others; shares

• Shows hand preference

Improved control of

intonation

• Increased memory

• Expressive: 900-1000

words

• Receptive: 12,000 words

Pragmatics

In general, children learn language within a

conversational context, most often with an adult.

• The child’s conversation is embedded in the “here

and now.”

Routines also permit scaffolding

Scaffolding (support) – adult adjusts their language and

teaches the child how to talk about events/objects that

are not in the immediate environment.

• Allows a child to talk about past/future events

• Accounts for about 50% of conversational time between

mom and child.

• Another way that preschool language changes is in the

frequent use of monologues or self-conversations

(accounts or about 20-30% of talking).

• One area where monologues are frequently observed is in

the pre-sleep habits of preschoolers:

– nursery rhymes, songs, sounds, verbal fantasies, expression

of feelings.

• Monologues may also be observed in solitary play.

Conversational Skills

Preschoolers can respond to a conversational

partner & engage in short dialogs characterized

by a few turns on a given topic.

• They can also change the topic.

• They need guidance / prompting to maintain a

conversational flow beyond 2+ turns.

Most topics introduced by a preschooler will

mention the listener in terms of their mental

state – feel, think, feel (suggests a role for

ToM). By age 4, most are aware of the listener’s shared assumptions or presuppositions (knowledge of topic) and begin to use more elliptical responses (What are you doing? Playing).

Registers

Topics

Deixis

Conversational Repair

By age 4, children can assume various roles,

especially in their play.

• During play, they can adopt different styles of

speaking called registers.

• Motherese is an example of a speech register.

Competence with different registers varies with age &

experience.

• The ability to play familiar (i.e., family) roles – mother,

baby – develops early.

• Roles outside the family (hairdresser) require greater skill

& a specific set of vocabulary terms.

Preschoolers use questions & contingent queries (requests for

clarification – Huh? What? ) to repair conversational

breakdowns.

• About 1/3 of their clarification requests seek general or non-

specific information (What?).

• At this age, the child is unable to determine what is

misunderstood

• It is not until about age 5 that a child is able to make well-

informed specific requests for clarification.

2 year olds also lack the ability to consistently respond to

requests for clarification & to actually repair the

breakdown.

• This is thought to be due to the inability to detect

ambiguity in what he/she said

– the listener often must prompt & specifically request

certain types of information in order to make sense of the

conversation.

A topic is simply defined as the content about

which we speak.

• It also serves as the cohesion in a conversation.

By age 1, a child is able to initiate a topic via glances,

gestures, vocalizations.

• By age 2, a child maintains a topic via adjacent

utterances, with the adult often using a question/answer

format to maintain the topic.

By age 3 ½ , the majority of a child’s utterances will stay

on a designated topic. Repetition is a key way that a child

of this age will maintain a topic:

• Adult:We will go to the store for daddy’s birthday present.

• Child: Daddy’s birthday present.

• Adult: Should we get him a razor?

• Child:Yes, get him a razor.