6 Summary of Session 4

This session explored the reasons why comprehension usually precedes production in language development, and how multilingualism and siblings affect vocabulary development. It looked at a way of thinking about language development called the transactional model: parents adapt their speech to children and children adapt their speech to parents in a dynamic back-and-forth. You explored some of the strategies children use to work out what words mean, including syntactic bootstrapping and saw that creating meaning is a dynamic, interactive process. Speakers repeat, question, prompt, expand, and reformulate utterances to smooth the course of conversation, to make themselves understood, and to home in on the conventional meaning and form of their language.

In the next session you’ll look at how children start to combine two and then three words together and get a foothold into a remarkable part of language called grammar.

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