Preschool & Early School Age Language Skills

Some of the specific language skills children are developing in early childhood include:

• Acquiring an expanding vocabulary
• Pronouncing difficult sounds (such as g, k, s, f, l, th)
• Using words as a tool for learning
• Understanding grammar rules
• Pre-literacy - All the important skills needed before children learn to read and write (used to be called reading readiness). Pre-literacy skills include verbal language abilities, phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, and understanding print concepts (e.g., how books are read left to right in English).
• Emergent literacy - The developmental sequence from pre-literacy to literacy that emerges in early and middle childhood.
• Vocabulary - Preschoolers’ vocabularies expand at a dizzying rate, so that they go from having hundreds of words to thousands by age five. Children learn new words at the approximate rate of five to six per day (Anglin, 1993). Many of these new words are abstract, now that preschoolers have advanced enough cognitively to understand them. Examples are prepositions (in, on , under, through, etc.), descriptive words (such as opposites), and conceptual words (colors and shapes).
• Grammar or syntax - The structure, or the rules and relationships, of the language.
• Phonology - The speech sounds that make up a language.
• Phonological awareness - Sensitivity to sounds, rhythm, and pronunciation of words. Phonological awareness is an indicator of emergent literacy and later reading and spelling achievement.
• Semantics - A linguistic term that refers to the meaning of words.
• Semantic bootstrapping - The way children figure out the rules of grammar based on their conceptual understanding of word categories (for example, verbs are action words). Preschoolers observe how adults use words to understand their appropriate usage (Bates & MacWhinney, 1987).
• Pragmatics - The practical skills needed for conversation, or the social context of communication, and is therefore heavily influenced by culture. Specifically, pragmatics include how we use language (how we greet, thank, etc.), change language (or adapt for certain situations or listeners), and follow rules for language (turn-taking, physical distance, interrupting, etc.). Young preschoolers typically make many pragmatic problems but by kindergarten age children are very skilled pragmatically.

Vignette:
During a typical conversation with pragmatically challenged three-year-olds at a preschool, the teacher asked the children if they noticed it was sunny today. Child A said, “Yes, it was very sunny at my house,” and child B responded, “Not my house, it’s always dark.” Child C said, “I’m scared of the dark and need to have a nightlight.” Child A: “My nightlight looks like flowers.” Child C: “I like flowers but they make Mommy sneeze.” Child B: “Listen to how loud I can sneeze.” And you can see the children’s conversation veers wildly….

• Over-generalization and over-restrictions - Preschoolers still make mistakes by both over- and under-generalizing. An example of over-generalizing is when “yesterday” is used to mean anytime in the past. Children can also over-generalize grammatical rules, such as when they say “funnest,” “breaked,” and “mouses.” Over-restriction (or under-generalizing) can be seen when children apply a term too narrowly, such as “van” meaning the family car only and not a general type of automobile.
• Literalists - Preschoolers’ thinking is still very concrete, so they tend to take words at their literal meaning. This makes understanding idioms (or figures of speech, such as “you’re pulling my leg”), similes (or open comparisons, such as “she is as clever as a fox”), and metaphors (or hidden comparisons, usually including the words “like” or “as,” such as “he is as cold as ice”).

Vignette:
I clearly remember being a preschooler and running outside to look after being told by one of my mother’s friends that it was “raining cats and dogs.” I was quite disappointed and embarrassed when the expression was explained and only meant hard rain was falling from the sky.

• Speech errors - Three-year-olds will often revert to toddler-like communication when emotional. This may include stuttering, sentence starts, and errors in syntax (sentence structure) and pronunciation. Most young preschoolers make mistakes in pronunciation, replacing difficult sounds with easier ones. For example, when one of my daughters was younger she made typical errors and would say, “Wook--it’s a wed yight!” instead of “Look--it’s a red light!” These types of mistakes decrease as children mature and their abilities to form consonants and consonant blends (such as th, fr, gr, or fl) improve.
• Expansions and recasts - Adult approaches that support early language acquisition. Expansions are when an adult elaborates on a child’s expression (for example, a child says “There’s a red ball,” to which the adult replies, “Yes, there is a big red ball in the corner”). Recasts are how adults correct young children’s language by restating the child’s words in a grammatically correct manner. For instance, when the child says, “It was funnest when I runned,” the adult says, “It was the most fun when you ran” (Bahannon & Stanowicz, 1988).