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This video shows two women giving examples of how to engage pragmatics with preschoolers while reading a book together
Credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3AzGznfH1s |
Age 3A three-year-old is becoming more talkative and is beginning to engage in longer conversation length. Spontaneous speech is more natural for a child at this age than conversation. Child begins to use directives and requests such as modal auxiliary verbs and indirect requests (Hobek, 2016).
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Age 4A four-year-old can assume various roles or registers, different styles of speaking (Owens, 2016). For example, a child at this age may role play and act like they are a different person and use language for that role. Child is able to relate emotions of others to desires/intentions (Hobek, 2016).
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Age 5A five-year-old uses mostly direct requests at this age. They repeat their words to be corrected and begins to assign gender to objects and people. 5 year olds are able to use centering and chaining to link entities to form a story nucleus and a sequence of events that lead directly from one to another (Owens, 2016).
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MorphologyThere are 2 different kinds of morphemes: free and bound morphemes. Free morphemes can be set alone in a sentence and having meaning such as the word /cat/. Bound morphemes can not be set alone in a sentence and do not have meaning alone such as /-s/ at the end of the word /cats/. These start to appear after a child's 2nd birthday.
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PhonologyBy age 3, children should acquire /t/, /d/, /k,/ /f/, /m/, /n/ and /w/ , by age 4 /j/ and /s/ should also be acquired (Owens, 2016). Phonological processes might be happening in your child, such as deleting final consonants (cu for cup) or reduplication (mama). By age 4 a child should be able to have a more complex syllable structure and use 3+ syllables in an utterance (Owens, 2016).
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SyntaxOne major reason children show certain syntactic patterns in their language is because these are patterns they hear in the language around them (Owens, 2016). Phrase development such as prepositional phrase development occurs by age 3, infinitive phrase development between 2 and 3, and gerund phrase development around age 4 (Hobek, 2016).
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Relational TermsThe order of acquisition of relational terms, such as location and time, is influenced by syntactic complexity, the amount of adult usage, and underlying cognitive concept (Owens, 2016). Relational terms include temporal relations, interrogatives and physical relations. Physical relations are terms such as thick/thin, fat/skinny, more/less and same/different and they are difficult for preschoolers to learn (Owens, 2016).
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credit: http://www.talkingpoint.org.uk
Starting conversations
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credit: http://www.therapiesforkids.com.au/
Rhyming games/ Singing songs
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