The Intentionality Model and Language Acquisition: Engagement, Effort and the Essential Tension in Development: 66 (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development) - Softcover

Bloom, Lois; Tinker, Erin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1405100893 ISBN 13: 9781405100892

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002

Synopsis

The Intentionality Model builds on the child's engagement in a world of persons and objects, the effort that learning language requires, and the essential tension between engagement and effort that propels language acquisition. According to this perspective, children learn language in acts of expression and interpretation; they work at acquiring language; all aspects of a child's development contribute to this process.

• Provides results of a longitudinal study which examined language acquisition in the second year of life in the context of developments in cognition, affect, and social connectedness
• Results of lag sequential analyses are reported to show how different behaviors--words, sentences, emotional expressions, conversational interactions, and construction thematic relations between objects in play--converged, both in the stream of children's actions in everyday events, in real time, an in developmental time between the emergence of words at about 13 months and the transition to simple sentences at about 2 years of age
• The conclusions show that performance counts for explaining language acquisition; language is not acquired independently but in relation to other behaviors; acquiring language is not easy and requires the work of behavioral coordination

About this title

About the Author

Lois Bloom (Ph.D., Columbia University, 1968) is an Edward Lee Thorndike Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research interests have centered on early language acquisition, in general, and the part played by developments in emotion and cognition, in particular, on language development.

Erin Tinker (M.A., New York University, 1990; M.A., Teachers College, Columbia University, 1993) is a Learning Specialist at the Trinity School in New York City.

From the Back Cover

This book is about the young child's intentionality and the importance of this intentionality for explaining language acquisition. Intentions are expressed in actions, and they are constructed by interpreting the actions of others. The cognitive, social, and emotional developments during the first three years of life lead to the elaboration of intentional states, and this elaboration involves the representation of more elements, roles, and relations. The elaboration further involves the child coming to be able to recall the past and anticipate events in the future that other persons cannot yet know. The increasingly elaborated and discrepant intentional states require that the child learn more of the language to express them. The Intentionality Model presented here builds on the child's engagement in a world of persons and objects, the effort that learning the language requires, and the essential tension between engagement and effort that moves language acquisition forward. According to this first person child-centered perspective, children learn language in acts of expression and interpretation; they work at acquiring language; and all aspects of a child's development contribute to this process.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1405100893
• ISBN 13: 9781405100892
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 115