Syntactic And Semantic Development
Syntactic Development
By the time children begin school, they are able to use language in many different ways to convey a variety of messages. By this time they have learnt when words combine with other words, they for sentences. These sentences must conform to particular patterns, and developing awareness of the sentence types. As children reach the school age, we find that children use four main sentence types. And just like adults, children choose the sentence type based on adults.
Declarative: are to make statements such as 'I going to have ta toes . In terms of syntactic structure the term has a subject that precedes the verb. In some cases the 'I' will be omitted such as the previous clause 'going to have ta toes'.
Imperatives: are used to direct someone to do something. In terms of syntactical structure, imperatives have a understood subject usually being 'you' that is generally omitted, as in 'read me story'.
Interrogatives: are to impose questions such as 'Whats this called?' and Whats that?'
Exclamatives: are used to make exclatory remarks, there primary structural feature is that they begin with how or what. For example, 'What a mess!' and 'How owwy!'.
Declarative: are to make statements such as 'I going to have ta toes . In terms of syntactic structure the term has a subject that precedes the verb. In some cases the 'I' will be omitted such as the previous clause 'going to have ta toes'.
Imperatives: are used to direct someone to do something. In terms of syntactical structure, imperatives have a understood subject usually being 'you' that is generally omitted, as in 'read me story'.
Interrogatives: are to impose questions such as 'Whats this called?' and Whats that?'
Exclamatives: are used to make exclatory remarks, there primary structural feature is that they begin with how or what. For example, 'What a mess!' and 'How owwy!'.
Semantic Development
Challenges in Semantic Development:
Children must learn how far the label extends to, i.e. 'dog' dosen't just refer to that dog, it refers to many dogs
The same item can be labeled a number of ways, i.e. 'dog' can be also called a 'rufus', 'pet', 'animal'
Overgeneralisations occur as children begin to explore the principles of meaning extension for their language. 'is any animal a dog?', 'which animals are actually dogs?'
Undergeneralisation is when a child uses a particular word for only a limited number of the context in which an adult would use the word.
Mismatch is when the child's understanding of the word is completely diffeent from that of an adult.
Children then use linguistic clues and past experience to work out what the correct meaning is. They very quickly become highly accurate at correctly labeling objects. As well, they will ask 'whats that?' and this will help them retune their meaning of the word. As they learn more labels, they will understand that there is a relationship between various groups of words, which are called semantic fields.
Children must learn how far the label extends to, i.e. 'dog' dosen't just refer to that dog, it refers to many dogs
The same item can be labeled a number of ways, i.e. 'dog' can be also called a 'rufus', 'pet', 'animal'
Overgeneralisations occur as children begin to explore the principles of meaning extension for their language. 'is any animal a dog?', 'which animals are actually dogs?'
Undergeneralisation is when a child uses a particular word for only a limited number of the context in which an adult would use the word.
Mismatch is when the child's understanding of the word is completely diffeent from that of an adult.
Children then use linguistic clues and past experience to work out what the correct meaning is. They very quickly become highly accurate at correctly labeling objects. As well, they will ask 'whats that?' and this will help them retune their meaning of the word. As they learn more labels, they will understand that there is a relationship between various groups of words, which are called semantic fields.