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Chapter 6
The Saga Continues: Language Development Through the Preschool Years
Chapter Overview
Welcome to the wild and wonderful preschool years, a time of inexhaustible energy, limitless curiosity, and
explosive communication development. In this chapter, we examine the phenomenal changes in a child’s
communication abilities as she runs, jumps, and shrieks through four more stages of language development. At the
close of the preceding chapter, the child was just beginning to combine words. By the close of this chapter, she will
be an enthusiastic and reasonably competent conversationalist. She will also begin to show evidence of a
Learning Outcomes
• Describe the gains children make in grammar during MLU stages 2 and 3 conversations.
• Discuss how children refine meaning during MLU stages 2 and 3.
• Trace the elaboration of sentences through the use of phrases, clauses, and continued advances in language use
during MLU stages 4 and 5.
• Explain the role that comprehension plays in relation to production of concepts, literacy, and later developing
forms.
• Explain the similarities and differences in learning two languages simultaneously and successively.
Key Terms and Concepts
• Modulations of meaning, p. 210
• Grammatical morphemes, p. 210
• Inflection, p. 210
• Plural, p. 210
• Possessive, p. 210
• Present progressive, p. 210
• Regular past tense, p. 210
• Irregular past tense, p. 210
• Copula verb, p. 210
• Auxiliary verb, p. 210
• Contracted forms, p. 210
• Overgeneralization/overextension, p. 212
• Pronoun, p. 212
• Postmodifier, p. 216
• Verb phrase, p. 216
• Negation, p. 217-218
• Nonexistence, p. 218
• Rejection, p. 218
• Metalinguistics, p. 226
• Book-sharing activities, p. 227
• Print interest, p. 227
• Comparatives, p. 230
• Superlatives, p. 230
• Grammatical ellipsis, p. 240
• Indirect requests, p. 241
• Logical sequences, p. 241
• Print referencing, p. 243
• Print-concept knowledge, p. 243
• Balanced bilingualism, p. 253
• Dominant language, p. 253
• Simultaneous acquisition, p. 253
• Bilingual first language acquisition, p. 253
• Bilingual second language acquisition, p. 253
• Unitary language system hypothesis, p. 254
• Dual language system hypothesis, p. 254
• Code mixing, p. 256
3 (speaker)
• Interlanguage, p. 259
• Tabors’ four stages of second language acquisition, p. 260: stage 1 (home language user), stage 2 (non-verbal
user of second language), stage 3 (telegraphic and formulaic user of second language), stage 4 (speaker of
second language)
Points of Emphasis
1. Virtually all of the changes seen in language development up through the preschool years are elaborations of
abilities that emerged in stage 1.
2. Stages 2 and 3
a. Stage 2 occurs between 27 months to 30 months, during which MLU is 2.0 to 2.5 morphemes. Stage 3
follows from 31 to 34 months, during which MLU is 2.5 to 3.0 morphemes.
b. Brown suggests that the greatest change occurring during stage 2 is what he calls the “modulations of
meaning” in simple sentences, which are accomplished by the use of grammatical morphemes.
c. Knowledge of the following grammatical morphemes may be useful: inflection, plural, possessive, present
progressive verb form, regular past tense verb form, irregular past tense verb form, copula verb, auxiliary
i) Children acquire pronouns in a progressive, fairly predictable manner.
(a) Before the child even enters stage 2, he probably uses a few pronouns including I, it, this and that.
(b) During stage 2, he will add my, mine, me and you.
(c) Children acquire subjective pronouns before objective pronouns, then acquire pronouns indicating
possession (e.g. his, their, our), and finally, use reflexive pronouns (e.g. myself, yourself).
g. During stage 2, the child begins to use the verbs have and do as main verbs and as auxiliary verbs. She also
produces semiauxiliary verb forms such as hafta, gonna and wanna. Other auxiliary verbs emerge in stages
2 and 3, starting at 27 months. The stage 3 child adds the verb to be as an auxiliary and copula form.
h. A phrase is a combination of words that are related to one another, and the combination serves a
grammatical purpose, but a phrase does not contain both a subject and a predicate.
i) Noun phrases contain a noun and words that describe or modify the noun.
(a) There are four kinds of modifiers in noun phrases: determiner, adjectival, initiator and
postmodifier.
(b) Although the child produces noun phrases in stage 2, he tends to use only determiners and
adjectivals as modifiers in these phrases. Noun phrases in stage 2 include pronouns and articles.
verb to be.
i. Children begin to express negation by late stage 1 and develop its proper use in the early part of stage 4.
i) Three periods of negation development have been identified that roughly correspond to the stages
described by Brown.
(a) Late stage 1-Early stage 2 (MLU 1.5-2.5): “No kick that.”
(b) Late stage 2-Early stage 3 (MLU 2.25-2.75): “I no like that.”
(c) Late stage 3-Early stage 4 (MLU 2.75-3.5): “Daddy is not going to work.”
ii) Bloom described three variations of negation during stage 2: nonexistence, rejection and denial.
iii) In stage 3, there are continued advances in the use of the negative form as the child adds no or not
between the subject and predicate, and adds auxiliary forms to negative forms.
(a) Brown considered the changes children make in the use of the negative form to be one of the most
important advances in stage 3.
j. Speakers can ask questions that elicit yes/no answers, and they can ask questions beginning with who,
whose, whom, what, where, which, when, why or how.
i) Three periods in the development of interrogative forms have been identified.
ii) Yes/no questions emerge between the ages of 25-28 months.
iii) During stage 2, children commonly use what and where questions, and why questions are added.
iv) In stage 3, the child is able to invert auxiliary verbs to ask questions, as well as invert copular verbs to
ask yes/no questions. The most frequent wh- words in stage 3 are what and where, but the child also
uses why, who, and how.
k. The child is about 31 months old before she begins to form true imperative sentences.
l. When the child begins to put words together, his vocabulary grows rapidly.
i) It has been estimated that between the ages of 19 months and 6 years, the child adds an average of nine
new words every day and by the age of 6 may have a comprehension vocabulary that reaches
approximately 14,000 words.
ii) The child at 24 months has about 200-300 words in his expressive vocabulary. The child in the latter
months of stage 2 will probably have a productive vocabulary of about 400 words and at the close of
stage 3, about 900.
iii) The child appears to acquire so much information about words so quickly, at least in part, because of
fast mapping.
m. Notable characteristics of pragmatics/conversation during stages 2 and 3 include use of the word “please,”
increased talking, greater skill in topic introduction, interruptions of the conversational partner, 2 turns per
conversational topic, topic collaborating, use of conversational repair strategies and lack of requests for
conversational repairs from adults.
i) The child’s presuppositional skills remain relatively undeveloped.
n. Caregivers co-construct narratives with children by providing the maximum amount of support necessary to
understand the narrative.
i) Narrative development plays a significant role in academic success.
ii) Narrative discourse occurs when the speaker produces at least two utterances in a temporal order about
an event or experience in the past or future.
iii) In order to produce narratives, a child must use multiple aspects of language and cognition.
iv) Children in this stage use recounts and accounts employing the strategies of chaining and centering.
v) The earliest attempts at narratives between ages 2-3 years consist of heaps.
o. The child’s attention to acoustic and linguistic language features and his ability to imitate them is called
metalinguistics.
iii) Print interest serves as a foundation for subsequent development of literacy.
3. Stages 4 and 5
a. Stage 4 occurs between 35 and 40 months, during which MLU is 3.0 to 3.75 morphemes. In stage 4, the
child places a phrase within a clause.
b. Stage 5 occurs roughly between 3.5 and 4 years, during which MLU ranges from 3.75 to 4.5. The child has
learned all that can be considered basic in speech and language by the end of this stage, and 9 of the 14
should, and would.
v) By the end of stage 5, the child shows mastery of common irregular verbs, but may have problems
with less common verbs that do not change when they change from present to past tense. Additionally,
stage 5 includes learning the rules for appropriate use of the copula in its contracted form, learning the
forms of the copula that reflect person/tense, mastering the third-person singular verb on the present
2) the wh-question clause (emerges during stage 4), and 3) the relative clause (doesn’t emerge until
stage 5 and beyond).
iv) By the time the child is 25-27 month old, she is using and correctly to join words. However, the child
does not consistently conjoin clauses with and and other conjunctions until late in stage 5.
e. Prior to stage 5, the child is able to embed phrases within simple sentences. During stage 5, she begins to
i) The stage 4 child has learned that a pause greater than 1 second means that the conversational partner
is probably not going to respond.
ii) By the end of stage 4 or the beginning of stage 5, the child is able to maintain a topic for more than 2
turns.
iii) The stage 5 child takes into consideration what is likely to be included in the next turn.
differently, depending on who speaks them. There appears to be three phases in learning that deictic
word pairs have opposing meanings.
x) Evidence suggests that grammatical ellipsis emerges slowly after a child is 3 years old and is gradually
mastered during the school years.
xi) Although the stage 4 and 5 child’s presuppositional skills have improved, she is still limited in these
(b) The child’s narratives will not typically include causality organization until he is 5 years old.
xv) Print referencing is one technique that adults use to direct a child’s attention to the forms, features and
functions of written language.
xvi) In stage 5, children show emerging print-concept knowledge.
xvii) In addition to print-concept knowledge, preschool children acquire alphabetic knowledge.
4. The role of comprehension and production in language development
a. Many language forms develop by the end of stage 5, where as others require more time and experience. The
reason for such protracted development leads us back to the relationship between cognition and language.
Children must gain understandings of concepts in order to learn to use some forms of grammar and meaning
effectively.
5. Bilingualism is a difficult concept to define.
a. It has been suggested that we should distinguish between individuals who are productive bilinguals and
6. If children learn two languages at the same time, it is simultaneous acquisition.
a. A child who acquires two languages from birth experiences bilingual first language acquisition, a term
which implies that the child becomes competent in both languages, presumably at an equal rate.
b. The term bilingual second language acquisition describes the child who begins the process of acquiring one
language before exposure to the second language. According to De Houwer, exposure to the second
language comes at least 1 month after birth but before the child’s second birthday.
c. If one language is dominant, as is usually the case, its vocabulary and grammatical rules may continue to
have undue influence on the nondominant language.
i) Research provides more support for the dual language system hypothesis than for the unitary language
system hypothesis.
f. In the case of simultaneous bilingualism, we have to consider which language is more highly preferred in a
child’s home and which language is more highly valued in the larger community.
g. Children who are exposed to two languages from birth follow the same overall developmental patterns and
hit developmental milestones at the same ages as children who are exposed to just one language.
h. Code mixing is the norm for bilingual children and adults.
i. There are three stages of language learning in simultaneous bilingualism.
7. Dual language usage is considered successive or sequential bilingualism if one language is established before the
speaker is exposed to a second language.
a. When the child applies something from his first language to the second language, we call that transfer, a
process that may be reflected in grammar, vocabulary, and phonology.
b. In cases of attrition, the dominant first language fades, and the second language becomes dominant.
c. The rate of acquisition is highly variable, and what can be said with a reasonable degree of confidence is
that some children are proficient in the second language within 1 year and most are proficient within 2, 3, or
4 years.
d. There are several stage-based models of language acquisition for successive bilingualism.
i) Owens offers a framework with three stages (social observer, messenger, speaker) where the
progression outlined in the stages is exactly what we observe in the monolingual child.
Discussion Topics
• Identify the order of pronoun development. Explain this order on the basis of the semantic, pragmatic and
syntactic characteristics of pronouns. What types of pronouns do students recall hearing young children use?
Brainstorm why those pronouns are more common.
• Discuss the possible relationships among cognition, comprehension and language production. Do you think it’s
possible for language production to precede comprehension in some cases? Can you think of real-life examples?
• How do booksharing activities contribute to the child’s metalinguistic knowledge?
• Discuss the technique known as print referencing to enhance the child’s emergent literacy.
• How are print-concept knowledge, alphabetic knowledge and phonological awareness similar yet different early
literacy skills?
• How do caregivers help their children tune into the regularities of language during stage 2 and 3?
• Should immigrants surrender their native language as their primary language when they immigrate to the United
States? Why or why not?
• Identify the issues that make defining bilingualism difficult. Define bilingualism, taking these issues into
account.
• Invoke a classroom debate regarding whether public school instruction should be in English only or whether
bilingual education should be provided when needed.
• What are code mixing and transfer, and how might they affect language development in bilingual children?
Suggested Activities
• View video recordings of children telling stories at different ages. Challenge members of the class to identify
the elements of narratives displayed by the children.
• Select a children’s book and read a story to the class. Require students to identify the elements of narratives as
described in the text.
• Ask students to select a target skill either involving a grammatical structure or an early literacy skill, and then
create a lesson plan involving a book for a preschool-aged child.
• Obtain spontaneous language samples from children ranging from 30-42 months of age. Transcribe the samples
and assign students the task of determining the stage of language development for each child by examining the
following language skills: questions, negatives, pronouns, verbs and topic maintenance.
• Split the class into groups. Assign each group a specific skill covered in the chapter, including morphology,
Assignment Suggestions
• Video Example 6.1 (p. 229): Watch the video of Becca engaged in book sharing with her mother. She is just
three years old, so it is likely that she is at the end of stage 3 or in early stage 4. As you watch the video, notice
Becca’s use of full sentences and her ability to pick out the relevant details from one page to another. Becca’s
mother uses many strategies to retain her daughter’s attention and to connect ideas through the story, such as
affirming what Becca says be repeating it, asking Wh- questions, and pointing at a picture to elicit comment.
• Video Reflection 6.1 (p. 240): Watch the video of a parent and her four-year-old son, Ben, discuss an art project
he completed just 30 minutes prior to the conversation. Notice Ben’s use of presupposition, then answer the
question.
• Readers may assess their understanding by completing these brief, self-check quizzes:
o 6.1 (p. 221): gains children make in grammar during MLU stages 2 and 3 conversations
o 6.2 (p. 229): how children refine meaning during MLU stages 2 and 3
o 6.3 (p. 248): elaboration of sentences through the use of phrases, clauses, and continued advances in
language use during MLU Stages 4 and 5
o 6.5 (p. 262): the similarities and differences in learning two languages simultaneously and successively
• Chapter Review 6.1 (p. 262)
Websites to Explore
• The website All Things Linguistic offers a post called “Protolinguist Resources: Teaching Yourself
Morphology” that includes a list of resources and practice materials for morphology.
• ASHA’s website discusses the skills involved with early literacy and the role an SLP plays in supporting early
literacy skills on a page titled “Emergent Literacy: Early Reading and Writing Development.”
