Dictionaries for Kids: Vegetables Names (meaning of words - early reader edition Book 2)

French Short Stories for Beginners: Je suis petite, moi?: I Love My Dad J? French, Grades 6 - Je t'aimerai toujours French Edition. C'est Bon de Faire des Bonds: French Edition of Hop on Pop. I Love to Sleep: I Love to Eat: La surprise de Lilly: Childrens French book, French French Conversation Collins Easy Learning. French-English Children's Visual Dictionaries. To begin with, psychologists have observed that speakers tend to use causative predicates and the paraphrases expressing their decompositional structure in different and partially non-interchangeable ways e.

Furthermore, CSEM provides no well-founded method for the identification of pre-conceptual primitives Pulman , and the claim that the bits of information to be inserted in the definition of word meaning should be ultimately perception-related looks disputable.

See Taylor , Deane The principled division between word knowledge and world knowledge introduced by CSEM does not have much to say about the dynamic interaction of the two in language use. TLS views lexical meaning as the output of the interaction of two systems: SF is a formalized representation of the basic features of a lexical item. It contains grammatical information that specifies how a word can contribute to the formation of syntactic structures, plus a set of variables and parameters whose value is determined through CS.

Skipping some technical details, TLS construes the dynamics governing the selection of these readings as follows. But even if explaining the contextual flexibility of word uses in terms of access to non-linguistic information were as unavoidable a move as TLS suggests, there may be reasons to doubt that the approach privileged by TLS is the best to provide a detailed account of such dynamics. A first problem has to do, once again, with definitional accuracy: Furthermore, the apparatus of TLS excludes from CS bits of encyclopedic knowledge that would be difficult to represent via lambda expressions, and yet are indispensable to select among the alternative meanings of a word Taylor , See also Wunderlich , Generative Lexicon Theory GLT; Pustejovsky developed out of a goal to provide a computational semantics for the way words modulate their meaning in language use, and proposed to model the contextual flexibility of lexical meaning as the output of formal operations defined over a generative lexicon.

According to GLT, the computational resources available to a lexical item w consist of the following four levels. In particular, qualia structure captures how humans understand objects and relations in the world and provides a minimal explanation for the behavior of lexical items based on some properties of their referents Pustejovsky GLT distinguishes four types of qualia:. Qualia structure is the primary explanatory device by which GLT accounts for polysemy: GLT is an ongoing research program Pustejovsky et al.

But like the theories mentioned so far, it has been subject to criticisms. Second, many have pointed out that while GLT reduces polysemy to a formal mechanism operating on information provided by the sentential context, contextual variations in lexical meaning often depend on non-linguistic factors e. Third, it has been argued that qualia structure sometimes overgenerates or undergenerates interpretations e.

To conclude this section, we shall mention some contemporary approaches to word meaning that develop the relational component of the structuralist paradigm. We can group them into two categories. On the one hand, we have symbolic approaches, whose goal is to build formalized models of lexical knowledge in which the lexicon is seen as a structured system of entries interconnected by sense relations such as synonymy, antonymy, and meronymy.

On the other, we have statistical approaches, whose primary aim is to investigate the patterns of co-occurrence among word forms in linguistic corpora. Statistical analysis, by contrast, is based on an attempt to gather evidence about the distribution of words in corpora and use this information to account for their meaning. It is important to mention that although network models and statistical analysis share an interest in developing computational tools for language processing, they are divided by a difference.

While symbolic networks are models of the architecture of the lexicon that seek to be cognitively adequate and to fit psycholinguistic evidence, statistical analysis is a practical methodology for the analysis of corpora which is not necessarily interested in providing a psychological account of the information that a subject must associate with words in order to master a lexicon see the entry on computational linguistics. As we have seen, most theories of lexical meaning in linguistics attempt to trace a plausible dividing line between word knowledge and world knowledge, and the various ways they tackle this task display some recurrent features.

They focus on the structural attributes of lexical meaning rather than on the dynamics of word use, they maintain that words encode distinctively linguistic information about their alternative senses, they see the study of word meaning as an enterprise whose epistemological niche is linguistic theory, and they assume that the lexicon constitutes a system whose properties can be illuminated with a fairly economical appeal to the landscape of factual knowledge and non-linguistic cognition.

In this section, we survey a group of theories that adopt a different stance on word meaning. The focus is once again psychological, which means that the overall goal is to provide a cognitively realistic account of the representational repertoire underlying our ability to use words.

But unlike the approaches mentioned in Section 4 , these theories tend to encourage a view on which the distinction between lexical semantics and pragmatics is highly unstable or impossible to draw , where word knowledge is richly interfaced with general intelligence, and where lexical activity is not sustained by an autonomous lexicon that operates entirely apart from other cognitive systems Evans The first part of this section will examine some cognitive linguistic theories of word meaning, whose primary aim is to shed light on the complexities of lexical phenomena through a characterization of the processes interfacing word knowledge with non-linguistic cognition.

The second part will go into some psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic approaches to word meaning, which attempt to identify the representational format and the neural correlates of word knowledge through the experimental study of lexical activity. At the beginning of the s, Eleanor Rosch put forth a new theory of the mental representation of categories. Concepts such as furniture or bird , she claimed, are not represented just as sets of criterial features with clear-cut boundaries, so that an item can be conceived as falling or not falling under the concept based on whether or not it meets some relevant criteria.

Several experiments seemed to show that the application of concepts was no simple yes-or-no business: An automobile is perceived as a better example of vehicle than a rowboat, and much better than an elevator; a carrot is more readily identified as falling under the concept vegetable than a pumpkin.

If lexical concepts were represented merely by criteria, such differences would be inexplicable when occurring between items that meet the criteria equally well. It is thus plausible to assume that the mental representations of category words are somehow closer to good examples than to bad examples of the category: According to Brugman, the meaning potential of a polysemous word can be modeled as a radial complex where a dominant sense is related to less typical senses by means of semantic relations such as metaphor and metonymy e. These associations are creative, perceptually grounded, systematic, cross-culturally uniform, and emerge on pre-linguistic patterns of conceptual activity which correlate with core elements of human embodied experience see the entries on metaphor and embodied cognition.

Another major innovation introduced by cognitive linguistics is the development of an encyclopedic approach to word meaning, as exemplified by Frame Semantics Fillmore , and by the Theory of Domains Langacker While the Mental Spaces Approach and Conceptual Metaphor Theory mainly regarded lexical phenomena as the product of patterns of association between concepts, Fillmore and Langacker turned their attention to the relation between the semantic information associated by language users to the elements of their lexicon and the partly non-conceptual bits of information constituting encyclopedic knowledge.

But knowledge structures of this kind cannot be modeled as standard concept-like representations.

Word Meaning (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The challenge, then, is to develop an account of the representational format of encyclopedic knowledge and describe the operations whereby it interacts with the basic semantic features of lexical expressions. The task is carried out in two steps. First, words are construed as the pairing of lexical forms with schematic concepts which have the prototypical properties of radial categories and function as access sites to encyclopedic knowledge. Second, an account of the overall organization of encyclopedic knowledge is provided. According to Fillmore, encyclopedic knowledge is represented in long-term memory in the form of frames , i.

Simply put, frames provide a schematic representation of the elements and entities associated with a particular domain of experience and convey the information required to use and interpret the lexical expressions employed to designate it. The meaning of this word cannot be grasped independently of a prior understanding of the notion of a circle.

Langacker argues that domains are typically structured into hierarchies that reflect meronymic relations and provide a basic conceptual ontology for language use. Importantly, single lexical items typically inhere to different domains, and this is one of the factors responsible for their polysemy. The notion of a frame has been widely adopted in cognitive psychology to model the dynamics of ad hoc categorization e. Research on the mental lexicon is concerned with a variety of problems for surveys, see, e. From a functional point of view, the mental lexicon is organized as a system of lexical entries , each containing the information related to a word mastered by a speaker Rapp A lexical entry for a word w is typically modeled as a complex representation made up of the following components Levelt , In this scenario, a theory of lexical meaning translates into an account of the information stored in the semantic form of lexical entries.

Naturally, a crucial part of the task consists in determining exactly what kind of information is stored in lexical semantic forms as opposed to, e. Not surprisingly, even in psycholinguistics tracing a neat functional separation between word processing and general-purpose cognition has proven a problematic task. Support for the preservation of some discontinuity between the two domains has been gathered via evidence that lexical representations seem to underdetermine the rich conceptual content words are used to convey e. According to Denes , lexical activity should be seen as the output of the interaction between two functionally neighboring systems, one broadly encompassing conceptual-encyclopedic knowledge and the other the mental lexicon, joined together and cooperating through the semantic form of lexical entries.

Contrary to the folk notion of a mental lexicon where word types are associated to fully specified meanings or senses, lexical semantic forms have therefore been taken to correspond to schematic representations whose primary function is to supervise the recruitment of the extra-linguistic information required to interpret word occurrences in language use.

The problem is debated, and there is no unanimous consensus on this matter. Beginning in the mids, neuropsychological research on cognitive deficits related to brain lesions has produced a considerable amount of findings related to the neural correlates of lexical semantic information and processing. More recently, the development of neuroimaging techniques such as PET, fMRI and ERP has provided further means to adjudicate hypotheses about lexical semantic processes in the brain Vigneau et al.

Here we do not intend to provide a complete overview of such results for a survey, see Faust We shall just mention three topics of neurolinguistic research that appear to bear on issues in the philosophy of lexical meaning: Two preliminary considerations should be kept in mind. First, a distinction must be drawn between the neural realization of word forms, i. A patient can understand what is the object represented by a picture shown to her and give evidence of her understanding, e. Second, there appears to be wide consensus about the irrelevance to brain processing of any distinction between strictly semantic and factual or encyclopedic information e.

Let us start with the partition of the semantic lexicon into categories. Neuropsychological research indicates that the ability to name objects or to answer simple questions involving such nouns can be selectively lost or preserved: Different patterns of brain activation may correspond to such dissociations between performances: However, the details of this partition have been interpreted in different ways.

Finally, Devlin et al. Let us now turn to common nouns and proper names. As we have seen, in the philosophy of language of the last decades, proper names of people, landmarks, countries, etc. Neuroscientific research on the processing of proper names and common nouns concurs, to some extent. To begin with, the retrieval of proper names is doubly dissociated from the retrieval of common nouns. Concerning localization, both the study of lesions and neuroimaging research initially converged in identifying the left temporal pole as playing a crucial role in the retrieval of proper names Damasio et al.

Other studies also contradict the left temporal pole hypothesis see the discussion in Semenza ; the temporary consensus seems to be that although processing of proper names is neurally distinct from common noun processing, their respective localizations are still unclear. Furthermore, a few neuropsychological studies have described patients whose competence on geographical names was preserved while names of people were lost: If these results were confirmed, it would turn out that the linguistic category of proper names is not homogeneous in terms of neural processing.

Finally, a word on the distinction between the inferential and the referential component of lexical competence. As we have seen in Section 3. Beginning with Warrington , many patients had been described that were more or less severely impaired in referential tasks such as naming from vision and other perceptual modalities as well , while their inferential competence was more or less intact.

The complementary pattern i. In recent years, many more patients exhibiting this pattern have been described. For example, in a study of 61 patients with lesions affecting linguistic abilities Kemmerer et al. Recently, some neuroimaging research found partly different patterns of activation corresponding to inferential and referential performances Tomaszewski Farias et al. Word Meaning First published Tue Jun 2, Philosophy of Language 3. Basics The notions of word and word meaning are problematic to pin down, and this is reflected in the difficulties one encounters in defining the basic terminology of lexical semantics.

Historical Background The study of word meaning acquired the status of a mature academic enterprise in the 19 th century, with the birth of historical-philological semantics Section 2. Philosophy of Language In this section we shall review some semantic and metasemantic theories in analytic philosophy that bear on how lexical meaning should be conceived and described. This is particularly striking in the case of lexical axioms such as the following: For example, consider the following exchange: Will Kim be hungry at 11am? Linguistics The emergence of modern linguistic theories of word meaning is customarily placed at the transition from historical-philological semantics Section 2.

Structuralist semantics views language as a symbolic system whose internal dynamics can be analyzed apart from the psychology of its users. Just as the rules of chess can be expressed without mentioning the mental properties of chess players, so the semantic attributes of words can be investigated simply by examining their relations to other elements in the same lexicon.

Since the primary subject matter of structuralist semantics is the role played by lexical expressions in structured linguistic systems, structuralist semantics privileges synchronic linguistic description.

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Diachronic accounts of the evolution of a word w presuppose an analysis of the relational properties statically exemplified by w at different stages of the lexical system it belongs to. As the semantic properties of lexical expressions depend on the relations they entertain with other expressions in the same lexical system, word meanings cannot be studied in isolation. This is both an epistemological and a foundational claim, i. Introduced by Trier , it argues that words should be studied by looking at their relations to other words in the same lexical field.

A lexical field is a set of semantically related lexical items whose meanings are mutually interdependent and which together provide a given domain of reality with conceptual structure. Lexical field theory assumes that lexical fields are closed sets with no overlapping meanings or semantic gaps. Whenever a word undergoes a change in meaning e. Developed in the second half of the s by European and American linguists e. This approach, prominent in the work of linguists such as Lyons , shares with lexical field theory the commitment to a mode of analysis that privileges the description of lexical relations, but departs from it in two important respects.

First, it postulates no isomorphism between sets of related words and domains of reality, thereby eliminating non-linguistic predicates from the theoretical vocabulary that can be used in the description of lexical relations, and dropping the assumption that the organization of lexical fields has to reflect ontology. Second, instead of deriving statements about the meaning relations entertained by a lexical item e. The central agent in the frame. The possible bad outcome. The decision that could trigger the bad outcome. The situation within which the risk exists. Information learned in such communicative contexts is treated as more generalizable and robust than that learned in a noncommunicative context.

Infants can use information about the statistics of syllables in the speech they hear to help them parse words. How do we know from hearing prettybaby that baby is more likely to be a word than tyba? One way is that the conditional probability of by following ba is higher than that of ba following ty. Babies can use such conditional probabilities of syllables following each other to detect word boundaries, that is, to distinguish between clusters of syllables that form a word and clusters that could be different words strung together.

In a pioneering study to test this notion, Saffran and colleagues exposed 8-month-old babies to recordings of trios of syllables that followed each other more frequently and syllables that were at the junctions between these trios and followed each other less frequently.

The latter had a lower conditional probability, representing how words compared with nonwords have syllable combinations that occur more frequently. After a period of exposure to the recording, the time the babies spent looking toward a sound source varied depending on whether they heard a trio of syllables that had appeared together more frequently or one that had appeared together less frequently. Babies and young children are sensitive to the statistical likelihood of events, which reveals that they both are attuned to regularities they observe in the world and use such regularities to draw inferences and make predictions based on their observations.

In one set of studies, for example, month-old babies were shown a box full of many red balls and only a few white balls. The babies were surprised when balls were poured out of the box and all of them happened to be white or when someone reached into the opaque box and happened to retrieve all white balls. Thus the babies were registering the low proportion of white balls and recognizing the improbability of these events Xu and Denison, In an important variation, however, if the experimenter looked into the box as she picked up the balls, the babies were not surprised if all white balls were selected.

Block A placed on the machine always made it go. Block B was associated with the machine turning on but only when Block A was also on the machine. They were also able to intervene correctly to make the machine stop by removing Block A and not Block B. Schulz and Bonawitz demonstrated that children use exploratory play to help them recognize causal relationships. They presented children mean age 57 months with a toy with an ambiguous causal mechanism, being one of two possibilities, or a toy with an unambiguous causal mechanism. In the ambiguous case, children and an adult played with a box that had two levers, one controlled by the child and one by the adult.

On the count of three, both the child and the experimenter pressed their levers, and two toys popped out of the box. The child and the experimenter simultaneously released the levers, and both toys disappeared into the box. The ambiguity lay in whether one or both of the levers caused the toys to emerge from the box. After this interaction, a different toy was brought out, and children could play with either of the toys. Children who witnessed ambiguous evidence for the causal mechanism played with the familiar toy more than the novel toy, while children who had seen unambiguous evidence for the mechanism elected to play more with a novel toy.

The causal ambiguity of the familiar toy motivated children to continue their exploration. Schulz and Bonawitz , p. Babies also can use the statistical distribution of events to infer the reason for failed actions and then deploy strategies to solve the problem. Suppose babies cannot get a toy to work. Is the failure because the toy is broken or because they do not know how to use it properly?

In one series of studies Gweon and Schulz, , month-old babies witnessed two adults pressing a button on a toy that. In one condition, one of the adults succeeded twice in getting the toy to play, while the other adult failed twice. In the other condition, each adult failed once and succeeded once. Babies were then handed a similar toy to play with that failed to produce the music when they pressed the button. Babies who earlier saw one adult succeed and the other fail turned to their mothers for help in getting the toy to work.

In contrast, babies who saw each adult succeed and fail once reached for a different toy. Thus, depending on the prior information babies observed, they inferred that there was either some lack of ability on their part or some problem with the toy. When they inferred that the problem was with their ability, they turned to their mother for help; when they inferred that the toy was broken, they reached for another one.

In one study, for example, 9-month-old babies saw an adult either reach for an object a noncommunicative act or point to an object a communicative act. The entire display was then screened from view, and after a brief delay, the curtains were opened, and babies saw either the same object in a new location or a new object in the same location. The short delay imposed a memory requirement, and for babies this young, encoding both the location and the identity of the object taxes their memory. As predicted, babies appeared to encode different aspects of the event in the different conditions.

When they had previously witnessed the adult reaching for the object, they were surprised when the object was in a new location but showed no renewed interest when there was a different object in the old location. In contrast, when babies first saw an adult point to the object, they were surprised when a new object appeared in the old location but not when the old object had changed locations Yoon et al.

Babies have the capacity to realize when someone is communicating something for their benefit and therefore to construe information differently than when they merely witness it. The significance of eye contact and other communication cues also is evident in research on whether, how, and when young children learn from video and other forms of digital media. Experiments conducted with month-olds, for example, revealed that they can learn from a person on a video screen if that person is communicating with them through a webcam-like environment, but they showed no evidence of learning from a prerecorded video of that person.

The webcam environment included social cues, such as back-and-forth conversation and other forms of social contact that are not possible in prerecorded video. Other studies found that toddlers learned verbs better during Skype video chats than during prerecorded video chats that did not allow for authentic eye contact or back-and-forth interaction Roseberry et al. See also Chapter 6 for more on technology and learning. The benefits of communicative pedagogical contexts for the conceptual development of preschool children also have been investigated.

But when those objects were doctored to be nonfunctional, the children in the nonpedagogical condition quickly abandoned their attempts to elicit the property and played with the objects in some other way. Children who saw the same evidence but with direct communication for their benefit persisted in trying to elicit the property from other objects Butler and Markman, a,b. Moreover the intentional but nonpedagogical condition versus the pedagogical condition produced strikingly different conceptions of the function Butler and Markman, Some objects were identical in appear-.

Half of the objects of each color or shape had the unforeseen property, and half did not. Children were told they could play with the objects for a while and then should put them away in their appropriate boxes when done. The goal was to see whether children would sort the objects by the salient perceptual property color or shape or by function. Children in the pedagogical condition viewed the function as definitive and classified the objects by systematically testing each to see whether it had the function, while children in the nonpedagogical condition sorted by the salient color or shape.

Thus, identical evidence is construed differently when children believe it has been produced for their benefit. Understanding the power of language is important for people who interact with children. Simple labels can help children unify disparate-looking things into coherent categories; thus labeling is a powerful way to foster conceptual development. Labels also can reify categories or concepts in ways that may or may not be intended.

Awareness of the benefits and pitfalls of the language used by adults is important for people who interact with children. The language used by adults affects cognitive growth and learning in children in many subtle ways. Labeling is a powerful way to foster conceptual development. Simple labels can help children unify disparate things into coherent categories, but can also have the unintended consequence of reinforcing categories or concepts that are not desirable.

Some kinds of categories—two round balls, for example—are fairly easy to form, such that even babies treat the objects as similar. But many objects that adults view as members of the same category are perceptually dissimilar, and children would not, on their own, categorize them together. Some categories have very diverse members: Atypical members of categories—thinking of a penguin as a bird, for example—also are difficult for children to categorize on their own. Hearing perceptually diverse objects called by the same label enables children to treat them as members of the same category, which in turn affects the kinds of inductive inferences children draw about them cf.

Even very young children will base their inductive inferences on the category to which objects belong rather than their perceptual features when the objects are labeled. Providing a common label for perceptually disparate objects also is a way of transmitting cultural knowledge to children. This effect of labeling objects speaks to one of the ways in which ordinary interaction with babies enriches their cognitive development and early learning Graham et al.

While categorization has many benefits for developing inductive reasoning, it can also ultimately be associated with inferences that exaggerate differences between categories and similarities within categories. This may be linked to some undesirable consequences, such as stereotyping or prejudice based on these inferences Master et al. It is impossible for any individual to experience first-hand all of the exemplars of a category.

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The use of generics is thus an indispensable way of learning about the category as a whole. Generics are a powerful way of conveying general facts, properties, or information about a category, and those generalizations often can stand even in the face of counterexamples Gelman, This stability has many advantages, but as with categorization, it also can be problematic—for example, generic statements about social categories can reify the categories and beliefs about them.

When an individual encounters members of a social category that do not share the relevant trait or behavior, those people may then be seen as exceptions but the generalization will still stand. Properties conveyed by generics also are construed as central or essential to the category Cimpian and Markman, Four- and 5-year-old children given the same information conveyed using generic versus nongeneric phrases interpret the information quite differently. Subtle differences in generic versus nongeneric language used to convey information to children can shape the kinds of generalizations they make, the strength of those generalizations, and the extent to which properties are considered central or defining of the category.

Here, too, generics can sometimes play an unwanted role Cimpian and Markman, Dweck and colleagues have shown that children who believe an ability is inherent and fixed are more likely to give up when faced with failure and to lose motivation for and interest in a task, while children who view an ability as malleable are more likely to take on the challenge and work to improve their skill. Many of the foundations of sophisticated forms of learning, including those important to academic success, are established in the earliest years of life. Development and early learning can be supported continuously as a child develops, and early knowledge and skills inform and influence future learning.

Many of these concepts describe cognitive processes that are implicit. By contrast with the explicit knowledge that older children and adults can put into words, implicit knowledge is tacit or nonconscious understanding that cannot readily be consciously described see, e. Examples of implicit knowledge in very young children include many of the early achievements discussed above, such as their implicit theories of living things and of the human mind and their nonconscious awareness of the statistical frequency of the associations among speech sounds in the language they are hearing.

Not all early learning is implicit, of course.

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Very young children are taking significant strides in their explicit knowledge of language, the functioning of objects, and the characteristics of people and animals in the world around them. Thus early learning occurs on two levels: This distinction between implicit and explicit learning can be confusing to early childhood practitioners and parents , who often do not observe or recognize evidence for the sophisticated implicit learning—or even the explicit learning—taking place in the young children in their care. Instead, toddlers and young children seem highly distractable, emotional, and not very capable of managing their impulses.

All of these observations about young children are true, but at the same time, their astonishing growth in language skills, their very different. This point is especially important because the cognitive abilities of young children are so easily underestimated.

In the past, for example, the prevalent belief that infants lack conceptual knowledge meant that parents and practitioners missed opportunities to explore with them cause and effect, number, or symbolic play. In light of these observations, how do early educators contribute to the cognitive growth of children in their first 3 years? One way is by providing appropriate support for the learning that is occurring in these very young children see, e. Using an abundance of child-directed language during social interaction, playing counting games e.

The implications for instructional practices and curricula for educators working with infants and toddlers are discussed further in Chapter 6. Another way that educators contribute to the cognitive growth of infants and toddlers is through the emotional support they provide Jamison et al. Emotional support of this kind is important not only as a positive. Moreover, the secure attachments that young children develop with educators contribute to an expectation of adult support that enables young children to approach learning opportunities more positively and confidently.

Emotional support and socioemotional development are discussed further later in this chapter. Consider, for example, a parent or other caregiver interacting with a 1-year-old over a shape-sorting toy. The adult may also be using number words to count the blocks as they are deposited.

In this interaction, moreover, the baby is developing both expectations for what this adult is like—safe, positive, responsive—and skills for social interaction such as turn taking. As children further develop cognitively as preschoolers, their growth calls for both similar and different behavior by the adults who work with them. First, they are more consciously aware of their knowledge—much more of their understanding is now explicit.

This means they are more capable of deliberately enlisting what they know into new learning situations, although they are not yet as competent or strategic in doing so as they will be in the primary grades. When faced with a problem or asked a question, they are more capable of offering an answer based on what they know, even when their knowledge is limited. Second, preschoolers are more competent in learning from their deliberate efforts to do so, such as trial-and-error or informal experimentation.

Nonetheless, the potential to underestimate the cognitive abilities of young children persists in the preschool and kindergarten years. A study in kindergarten revealed that teachers spent most of their time in basic content that children already knew, yet the children benefited more from advanced reading and mathematics content Claessens et al.

One example is interactive storybook reading, in which children describe the pictures and label their elements while the adult and child ask and answer questions of each other about the narrative. In each case, dialogic conversation about text. Language and literacy skills are discussed further in a subsequent section of this chapter, as well as in Chapter 6.

In a similar manner, board games can provide a basis for learning and extending number concepts. In several experimental demonstrations, when preschool children played number board games specifically designed to foster their mental representations of numerical quantities, they showed improvements in number line estimates, count-on skill, numerical identification, and other important quantitative concepts Laski and Siegler, Other research has shown that instructional strategies that promote higher-level thinking, creativity, and even abstract understanding, such as talking about ideas or about future events, is associated with greater cognitive achievement by preschool-age children e.

These activities also can be integrated into other instructional practices during a typical day. Preschool-age children are developing a sense of themselves and their competencies, including their academic skills Marsh et al. Their beliefs about their abilities in reading, counting, vocabulary, number games, and other academic competencies derive from several sources, including spontaneous social comparison with other children and feedback from teachers and parents concerning their achievement and the reasons they have done well or poorly.

Primary grade children are using more complex vocabulary and grammar. They are growing in their ability to make mental representations, but they still have difficulty grasping abstract concepts without the aid of real-life references and materials Tomlinson, This is a critical time for children to develop confidence in all areas of life. Children at this age show more independence from parents and family, while friendship, being liked and accepted by peers, becomes more important. Being in school most of the day means greater contact with a larger world, and children begin to develop a greater understanding of their place in that world CDC, Children understand their own feelings more and more, and learn better ways to describe experiences and express thoughts and feelings.

They better understand the consequences of their actions, and their focus on concern for others grows.

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They are very observant, are willing to play cooperatively and work in teams, and can resolve some conflicts without seeking adult intervention CDC, Children who are unable to self-regulate have emotional difficulties that may interfere with their learning. Educators in these settings are scaffolding the skills that began to develop earlier, so that children are able to gradually apply those skills with less and less external support.

This serves as a bridge to succeeding in upper primary grades, so if students lack necessary knowledge and skills in any domain of development and learning, their experience during the early elementary grades is crucial in helping them gain those competencies. Building on many of the themes that have emerged from this discussion, the following sections continue by looking in more depth at cognitive development with respect to learning specific subjects and then at other major elements of development, including general learning competencies, socioemotional development, and physical development and health.

These skills and abilities include the general cognitive development discussed above, the general learning competencies that allow children to control their own attention and thinking; and the emotion regulation that allows children to control their own emotions and participate in classroom activities in a productive way the latter two are discussed in sections later in this chapter. Still another important category of skills and abilities, the focus of this section, is subject-matter content knowledge and skills, such as competencies needed specifically for learning language and literacy or mathematics.

Content knowledge and skills are acquired through a developmental process. As children learn about a topic, they progress through increasingly sophisticated levels of thinking with accompanying cognitive components. These developmental learning paths can be used as the core of a learning trajectory through which students can be supported by educators who understand both the content and those levels of thinking. Each learning trajectory has three parts: Learning trajectories also promote the learning of skills and concepts together—an effective approach that leads to both mastery and more fluent, flexible use of skills, as well as to superior conceptual understanding Fuson and Kwon, ; National Mathematics Advisory Panel, See Chapter 6 for additional discussion of using learning trajectories and other instructional practices.

Every subject area requires specific content knowledge and skills that are acquired through developmental learning processes. It is not possible to cover the specifics here for every subject area a young child learns. To maintain a feasible scope, this chapter covers two core subject areas: This scope is not meant to imply that learning in other areas, such as science, engineering, social studies, or the arts, is unimportant or less subject specific.

Rather, these two were selected because they are foundational for other subject areas and for later academic achievement, and because how they are learned has been well studied in young children compared with many other subject areas. The development of language and literacy includes knowl-. The following sections address the development of language and literacy skills, including the relationship between the two; the role of the language-learning environment; socioeconomic disparities in early language environments; and language and literacy development in dual language learners.

Language skills build in a developmental progression over time as children increase their vocabulary, average sentence length, complexity and sophistication of sentence structure and grammar, and ability to express new ideas through words Kipping et al. Catts and Kamhi define five features of language that both work independently and interact as children develop language skills: The first three parameters combined phonology, semantics, and morphology enable listening and speaking vocabulary to develop, and they also contribute to the ability to read individual words. Developing oral communication skills are closely linked to the interactions and social bonds between adults and children.

This comprehension begins with pragmatics—the social aspects of language that include facial and body language as well as words, such that infants recognize positive and negative interactions. Semantics understanding meanings of words and clusters of words that are related soon follows, in which toddlers link objects and their attributes to words. Between the ages of 2 and 4, most children show dramatic growth in language, particularly in understanding the meanings of words, their interrelationships, and grammatical forms Scarborough, Karmiloff and Karmiloff-Smith suggest that children build webs among words with similar semantics, which leads to broader generalizations among classes of related words.

Then, as new words arise from conversation, storytelling, and book reading, these words are linked to. The more often adults use particular words in conversation with young children, the sooner children will use those words in their own speech Karmiloff and Karmiloff-Smith, Research has linked the size of vocabulary of 2-year-olds to their reading comprehension through fifth grade Lee, Book reading stimulates conversation outside the immediate context—for example, children ask questions about the illustrations that may or may not be central to the story.

This introduces new words, which children attach to the features of the illustrations they point out and incorporate into book-centered conversations. This type of language, removed from the here and now, is decontextualized language. Children exposed to experiences not occurring in their immediate environment are more likely to understand and use decontextualized language Hindman et al. Repeated routines also contribute to language development. As books are read repeatedly, children become familiar with the vocabulary of the story and their conversations can be elaborated.

Routines help children with developmental delays acquire language and use it more intelligibly van Kleek, The long-term effect of high-quality teacher—child book-centered interactions in preschool lasted through the end of first grade. New research shows that the effects of interactive reading also hold when adapted to the use of digital media as a platform for decontextualized language and other forms of language development. However, a few studies of e-books also have shown that the bells and whistles of the devices can get in the.

See also the discussion of effective use of technology in instruction in Chapter 6. Alongside developing depth of vocabulary including the meaning of words and phrases and their appropriate use in context , other important parameters of language development are syntax rules for combining and ordering words in phrases, as in rules of grammar and morphology meaningful parts of words and word tenses. Even before the age of 2, toddlers parse a speech stream into grammatical units Hawthorne and Gerken, Long before preschool, most children join words together into sentences and begin to use the rules of grammar i.

Along with these morphemic changes to words, understanding syntax helps children order the words and phrases in their sentences to convey and to change meaning. Before children learn to read, the rules of syntax help them derive meaning from what they hear and convey meaning through speech. Cunningham and Zibulsky , p. Although syntactic understanding develops for most children through conversation with adults and older children, children also use these rules of syntax to extract meaning from printed words. This becomes an important reading skill after first grade, when text meaning is less likely to be supported with pictures.

Construction of sentences with passive voice and other complex, decontextualized word forms are more likely to be found in books and stories than in directive conversations with young children. An experimental study illustrates the role of exposure to syntactic structures in the development of language comprehension Vasilyeva et al. Four-year-olds listened to stories in active or passive voice. After listening to ten stories, their understanding of passages containing these syntactic structures was assessed. Although students in both groups understood and could use active voice similar to routine conversation , those who listened to stories with passive voice scored higher on comprehension of this structure.

Literacy skills follow a developmental trajectory such that early skills and stages lead into more complex and integrated skills and stages Adams, Seminal theories and studies of reading describe an inextricable link between language development and reading achievement e. Early oral language competencies predict later literacy Pearson and Hiebert, Not only do young children with stronger oral language competencies acquire new language skills faster than students with poorly developed oral language competencies Dickinson and Porche, , but they also learn key literacy skills faster, such as phonemic awareness and understanding of the alphabetic principle Cooper et al.

Both of these literacy skills in turn facilitate learning to read in kindergarten and first grade. Vocabulary development a complex and integrative feature of language that grows continuously and reading words a skill that most children master by third or fourth grade Ehri, are reciprocally related, and both reading words accurately and understanding what words mean contribute to reading comprehension Gough et al.

Because comprehending and learning from text depend largely upon a deep understanding of the language used to communicate the ideas and concepts expressed, oral language skills i. For example, children with larger speaking vocabularies in preschool may have an easier time with phoneme awareness and the alphabetic. Each word a child knows can influence how well she or he understands a sentence that uses that word, which in turn can influence the acquisition of knowledge and the ability to learn new words.

A stronger speaking and listening vocabulary provides a deeper and wider field of words students can attempt to match to printed words. Being bogged down by figuring out what a given word means slows the rate of information processing and limits what is learned from a sentence.

Thus, differences in early vocabulary can have cascading, cumulative effects Fernald et al. The transition from speaking and listening to reading and writing is not a smooth one for many children. Although a well-developed vocabulary can make that transition easier, many children also have difficulty learning the production and meanings of words.

Longitudinal studies of reading disability have found that 70 percent of poor readers had a history of language difficulties Catts et al. The oral language and vocabulary children learn through interactions with parents, siblings, and caregivers and through high-quality interactions with educators provide the foundation for later literacy and for learning across all subject areas, as well as for their socioemotional well-being. The language interactions children experience at home and in school influence their developing minds and their understanding of concepts and ideas.

The daily talk to which children are exposed and in which they participate is essential for developing their minds—a key ingredient for building their knowledge of the world and their understanding of concepts and ideas. In turn, this conceptual knowledge is a cornerstone of reading success. The bulk of the research on early linguistic experiences has investigated language input in the home environment, demonstrating the features of.

The evidence accumulated emphasizes the importance of the quantity of communicative input i. This research has particularly relevant implications for educational practices discussed further in Chapter 6. The language environment of the classroom can function as a support for developing the kind of language that is characteristic of the school curriculum—for example, giving children opportunities to develop the sophisticated vocabulary and complex syntax found in texts, beginning at a very early age Schleppegrell, ; Snow and Uccelli, Moreover, advances in cognitive science suggest that it is not enough to be immersed in environments that offer multiple opportunities for exposure to varied and rich language experiences.