Phonology

Phonology

1. Morphology

   • Semantics
     • Syntax
       • Pragmatics
         • Pragmatic development involves acquiring the rules of language that govern how language is used as a social tool
         • Developing a range of communication functions is an important aspect of language development that emerges in infancy and continues through adolescence and adulthood.
           • Given the importance of facial expression, posture, eye contact and other extralinguistic cues to the success or failure of children’s communication with other people, the fact that children acquire sensitivity to these aspects of language early in development is not surprising
             • For example if someone steps on your toe, you can use the direct command, “Get off my toe” To be a little polite you can say “Hey, you’re on my toe”
       • Syntactic development is internalization of the rules of language that govern how words are organized into sentences. It is considered a more resilient aspect of language, proceeding in a mostly uniform pattern in both the type and the timing of development. “Tell her what you said”
       • During early and later childhood, children use a range of sentence types, including the declarative, negative, and interrogative.
         • Young children often make pronoun case errors in which they use the subjective case me in place of the nominative case I, as in “me do it” and “me cook it”
           • A pronoun form may be used after a subject noun, as in “My mother she”…or the man in middle, he…
     • Semantic refers to an individual’s learning and storage of the meanings of words. Knowledge of a specific word matures with time and that a child’s early knowledge and use if a word may be incomplete. Adelaide readily incorporated a new word “vent” into her vocabulary. With additional exposure to the word in various contexts, Adelaide’s initial representation will develop from a relatively immature state to a more flexible, adultlike representation.
     • When practitioners think about the size of a child’s lexicon, they consider not only volumes but also the individual lexical items it contains. Children’s early lexicons. Comprising the first 50 or so words, typically contain at least 1 word in each semantic category
       • Most Americans can readily cite cases where the word for an item in one region differs from that used in another. When travelers return home from a visit to New England talking about how “frappe” and “cabinet” are used, whereas other regions might use the term “milkshake
   • Morphological development is the internalization of the rules of language that govern word structure. Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of language, and many words comprise a combination of several morphemes. For example the root word “child” to create the adjective “childlike”
     • When children include a grammatical morpheme in 75% or more of obligatory contexts they are said to have mastered the morpheme
       • It has been found that speakers occasionally omit the –ed suffix in a sentence like “Yesterday they walk’ by the park”. In some socially defined dialects, the suffix may be absent more frequently.
   • Children’s earliest words and sentences contain few grammatical morphemes it only for the first year or two. At about age 2 years, children begin to use the first appearing grammatical morpheme, the present progressive –ing

2. Phonology is concerned with which speech sounds a language uses and how they are arranged and function within that language. /r/ and /l/ are two different phonemes low vs row, river vs liver

3. As children develop their phonological system, they develop an internal representation of each phoneme in their native language, which is important to differentiate minimal pairs. Some children internal phonological representations seem to be more sophisticated than their expressive capabilities.

4. Phonological development also involves developing sensitivity to the phonotactics rules of a person’s native language; these rules specify legal orders of sounds in syllables and words and the places where specific phonemes can and cannot occur. Early in development, children become sensitive to both.

5. R and L. A number if regionally and socially significant pronunciations are also found in the r and l sounds. After a vowel, the r may be lost and an uh like vowel (schwa) or dictionary u) may take its place. The “cah” or “fouh” pronunciations for car and four are typical of this variations.