Chapter focus questions

1. What is semantic development?
2. What is morphological development?
3. What is syntactic development?
4. What is phonological development?
5. What is pragmatic development?

Children'slanguage development involves achieving competence in content, form (morphology, syntax, phonology), and use (pragmatics). This chapter discusses the basic building blocks that correspond to thechild's key tasks in achieving competence in these areas.
Semantic development involves three major tasks. The first is acquiring a mental lexicon of roughly 60,000 words between infancy and adulthood.Mental lexicon refers to the volume of words an individual understands and uses. The mental lexicon includes a variety of word types, which for young children includes specific nominals, generalnominals, action words, modifiers, and personal–social words. The second task is acquiring words rapidly during word-learning opportunities. Upon exposure to a new word, children's representation of thatword emerges gradually, from an immature state to an adultlike form. Some features of words influence the ease with which children learn them, including the concept represented by the word, thephonological form of the word, and contextual conditions at initial exposure. The third task is organizing the mental lexicon in an efficient semantic network so that entries can be readily retrieved.Children develop links among entries in the semantic network that reflect the strength of associations between words for syntactic, conceptual, and phonological features.
Morphological developmentdescribes internalization of the rules of language that govern the structure of words. Key building blocks include acquiring grammatical and derivational morphology. Grammatical morphemes are used to inflectwords for grammatical purposes; these include use of past, future, and present tense markings of verbs and plural and possessive markings of nouns. Derivational morphemes are used to modify root...