California Preschool Learning Foundations - ECEZero2Three ...

don’t really want to”) (Curenton and
Justice 2004).
Word-level accomplishments relate
to the child’s manipulation of word
structure for grammatical purposes.
Between two and five years of age,
children acquire the ability to inflect
words to be more precise in meaning.
For instance, one of the earliest wordstructure
achievements (by about two
years of age) is inflecting verbs with
the -ing marker to denote present progressive,
as in “cat jumping” (Brown
1973). By three years of age, children
are using the past tense -ed marker to
denote events occurring in the past, as
in, “I walked” (Brown 1973). As children
develop their comprehension and
use of these verb inflections, they tend
to make errors, as in “He going” (in
which the auxiliary verb is is omitted),
“I wented,” or “He hitted” (in which the
-ed marker is added to an irregular
past tense verb that does not take the
-ed), and Carlos “walkded” (in which
the -ed marker is added twice). Such
errors are entirely commonplace and
typical in early grammatical acquisition
and will gradually be replaced
with more accurate use (Brown 1973).
By five years of age, children are quite
accurate in their inflections of verbs
for past tense, present progressive
tense, and future tense (Brown 1973).
It is important to note that some dialectical
variations in the United States
affect verb inflections. For instance,
children who speak some variations
of African-American English may omit
the plural marker (e.g., two dollar) or
modify the future tense (e.g., “She be
mad”) in ways that differ from Standard
American English but are wholly
appropriate to the individual’s dialect
(Owens 1996).
California Department of Education • Preschool Learning Foundations, Volume 1
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Another type of word-level achievement
emphasized in the foundations is
the child’s development of pronouns.
“Pronouns” are grammatical structures
that serve in the place of nouns. They
include subject pronouns (I, you, he,
she, they), object pronouns (me, you,
him, her, them), possessive pronouns
(hers, his, theirs), reflexive pronouns
(myself, herself), and demonstrative
pronouns (this, that, those). Typically,
children first develop the pronouns to
refer to self (I, me, mine, my) between
18 and 24 months of age (see Owens
1996). Between 24 months and five
years of age, children gradually master
the other pronouns to include a variety
of subject, object, possessive, and
reflexive pronouns. Errors in usage are
very common as children develop their
skills with pronouns, such as, “Her did
it” and “It’s hims” (Owens 1996). With
experience and development children
will typically show few difficulties with
pronouns by the end of the preschool
period.
As indicated concerning the development
of children’s vocabulary,
children’s ability to use increasingly
sophisticated language structures
allows them to make greater use
of “decontextualized language”—
language that requires little reliance
on the context for it to be understood.
By contrast, “contextualized language”
requires context to aid in understanding.
For example, contrast the two sentences:
“He took it” and “That boy over
there took my green ball.” Obviously,
the latter example requires much less
context for it to be understood; likewise,
the latter example also places
a great burden on the speaker to
be linguistically precise. This level of
linguistic precision, required in decon-
LANGUAGE AND LITERACY