California Preschool Learning Foundations - ECEZero2Three ...

LANGUAGE AND LITERACY
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in hearing complex sentences from
their teachers (Huttenlocher and others
2002).
The foundations are organized to
emphasize the child’s grammatical
accomplishments at both the sentence
and the word levels. Sentence-level
accomplishments relate to the child’s
use and production of increasingly
complex and longer sentences. Wordlevel
accomplishments relate to the
child’s manipulation of word structure
for grammatical purposes.
One foundation emphasizes children’s
grammatical accomplishments
at the sentence level. Typically, the
sentences of three-year-old children
average about 3.5 words, and those of
four-year-olds increase to about five
words in length. (Brown 1973). While
the increase in the length of sentences
is not dramatic, there is a significant
increase in the internal complexity of
the sentences children are producing.
By two years of age, children begin to
produce simple sentences that include
a noun + predicate (e.g., “doggy sit,”
“mommy work”). Later, children begin
to elaborate nouns by making noun
phrases (e.g., “the big brown doggy,”
“my mommy,” “my daddy’s gloves”). By
four years of age, children commonly
produce elaborated noun phrases that
include determiners (e.g., the, a, an,
all, both, one, two) and adjectives (e.g.,
green, little, fast, angry). This increase
in complexity allows children to be
highly precise in their language use
(e.g., “I want that little green one over
there”). A related development centers
on children’s ability to produce negative
sentences. Children’s use of basic
negative sentences during the second
year (e.g., “no go,” “no want”) becomes
more precisely stated between ages
three and four. Typically, these nega-
tive sentences include a fully inflected
verb structure, as in, “I don’t want
any” and “You are not going.” Some
errors in negation will be seen during
the preschool age (e.g., “I do want to
do that!”), but these errors will become
less frequent by four and five years of
age as children achieve grammatical
mastery (see Hoff 2004; Owens 1996).
As children near three years of age,
they begin to organize phrases and
clauses to produce compound sentences
(e.g., “I want the cupcake and
I want the cake, too”) and complex
sentences (e.g., “La’Kori is my friend
because we go to school together”).
Children typically begin producing
compound sentences (conjoined with
but, so, or, and and) by three years of
age and then start to conjoin clauses
to form complex sentences (using if
and because) soon thereafter (Brown
1973).
By four years of age, most children
have become skilled at both clausal
embedding and clausal conjoining.
“Clausal embedding” occurs when a
dependent clause is embedded within
an independent clause, as with, “Jose,
who is two, is not yet talking” (here,
the clause “who is two” is embedded
into another clause). “Clausal conjoining”
occurs when children link
clauses, as in, “He took my toy, but I
didn’t want it” and “When I am four,
I can chew gum.” At four years up to
one-third of children’s sentences will
be complex (Huttenlocher and others
2002), with the remainder being simple.
In addition, by four years of age,
children are typically able to produce
complex-compound sentences that
include the conjoining of two sentences
using and or but as well as clauses
embedded within the sentences (e.g.,
“I will go because she said to but I
Preschool Learning Foundations, Volume 1 • California Department of Education