# data[].attributes.headline
Pragmatic Development and its Building Blocks

# data[].attributes.subject
Pragmatic Development and its Building Blocks

# data[].attributes.body
Pragmatic development involves acquiring the rules of language that govern how language is used as a social tool in order to have a conversation. Three important aspects of this are using language for different communication functions, developing conversational skills, and gaining sensitivity to extralinguistic cues. With this we can see the progression of "Give me that" to "Can I have that please." We are able to continue to make progress in our language in order to communicate our wants, needs and thoughts to the people around us. In order to develop conversational skills, we must first develop an understanding of conversational schema. As children must first learn the organizational structure of a conversation (initiation, topic establishment, and closure) before they can begin to think more in depth about what they are wanting to talk about and navigate about different topics and subtopics that may come up.

# data[].attributes.body
There are three major tasks involved in semantic development which include: 1. acquiring a mental lexicon of about 60,000 words between infancy and adulthood, 2. learning new words rapidly, 3. organizing the mental lexicon in an efficient semantic network. Mental lexicon refers to the number of words a person understands (receptive lexicon) and uses (expressive lexicon). People tend to have a higher volume of receptive lexicon as opposed to expressive lexicon because most people do not put their entire vocabulary in use when speaking or writing. When a child learns a new word, there is the initial hearing the word and learning its meaning, but there is a time between learning the word and actually being able to use it the correct way and understanding what it really means. A child must first learn the concept of the words, then the phonological form of the word (meaning changing one part of the word can give it a completely different meaning), and contextual conditions at initial exposure (developing an understanding of its context).

# data[].attributes.body
Semantic development is a child's ability to learn and store the meaning of words. A child's development of semantics and syntax go hand in hand as they apply the meaning of a word and how they use them in a sentence. On page 51, it mentions that when a child learns the meaning of a new word, they must also learn its phonological form, grammatical role and conceptual meaning.

# data[].attributes.body
With a given number of elements that allow a child to form an uncountable amount of sentences, there are three major syntactic achievements: 1. an increase in utterance length.. 2. the use of different sentence modalities... and 3. the development of complex syntax. Utterance length refers to a child's ability to form longer and in depth sentences. With syntactic development comes other sentence modalities. Children begin to develop the ability to form different types of sentences which include declaratives, negatives, and interrogatives.

# data[].attributes.body
Syntactic development refers to a child's ability to breakdown how words are organized into sentences. This is what gives a child the ability to form full thoughts and ideas rather than using single words. They will begin to understand how to organize words into sentences that have meaning and purpose. With the development of this, children will also form their understanding of grammar within these sentences and ideas as their development flourishes.

# data[].attributes.body
Morphological development is the internalization of the rules of language that govern word structure. This allows children to expand their vocabulary and inflect on different words. (Such as adding -s, -ed or -ness to the end of a word or adding un-, co-, or pre- to the beginning of a word). The rate at which a child reaches this development also depends on what their native language is and how inflected that given language is; also taken into consideration is the dialect a language is spoken in.

# data[].attributes.body
Two more important influences on phonological development are a child's native language as well as their experience with linguistics. This section as well as the one before it stresses the importance of a child's exposure to language, as this includes things that we may think that children will not understand. Without this, a child will not have the potential to develop the ability to use all potential phonological structures in language. I think this is a great explanation of why it isn't always a great idea to "dumb it down" in a way we think kids will understand, rather we can say something in the same way we would speak to another adult, followed by "and what that means is..."

# data[].attributes.headline
Phonemic Inventory and Phonological Awareness

# data[].attributes.subject
Phonemic Inventory and Phonological Awareness

# data[].attributes.body
Phonological knowledge and production/expression are a child's ability to understand and express phonemes in their native language. Little by little, children will be able to make distinctions of phonemes (sounds) in their language and distinguish how they are used in parts of speech. We can see this happening in real time when we hear a child make up rhymes based off a word they hear, which begins to develop sufficiently by the age of 3-4. After this point, children can begin development of their ability to count syllables, continue to rhyme, identify sounds, say a word without the beginning sound, and count of the sounds they hear in a given and spoken word. Letter sequencing is a part of phonemic awareness that comes later on, meaning the understanding that the sequence OUGH makes the sound /o/ and PH making the sound /f/.

# data[].attributes.headline
Cues to Segment Streams of Speech cont. 

# data[].attributes.subject
Cues to Segment Streams of Speech cont. 

# data[].attributes.body
Phonotactic cues are those also used by infants to analyze speech. Their ability to do this allows infants to learn that the chance of given sounds are going to occur in a certain place in a word. This includes syllables, and consonant/vowel placement. The paragraph includes the example that the sound structure /gz/ is very unlikely to start a word, but highly likely to end a word.

# data[].attributes.body
Cues to Segment Streams of Speech: These include prosodic cues and phonotactic cues. Prosodic cues are those used by infants to become familiar with speech patterns. This strategy allows them to differentiate between words, they hear the pause between words and recognize this means to separate words were said. Page 34 states, "Infants' sensitivity to the way in which pausing marks linguistic boundaries within speech streams, such as clause segments, may support their syntactic development because it provides the opportunity to analyze how smaller syntactic units combine to form larger units of speech." This is something I never thought about when we talk to infants; before we even think they are learning things like this, that something like this can be crucial to their speech development.

# data[].attributes.body
Phonological development involves the rules of language that govern the sound structure of syllables and words. These include phonemes (individual speech sounds that signal a contrast in meanings).