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Pragmatics and Lexical Growth
1973 - 1980
Pragmatic competence and discourse functions are central, with research tracing intentional acts, requests, and context-driven speech as scaffolds for later grammar. Cross-language patterns in deixis and locative semantics reveal staged acquisition and transfer effects across languages in school-age contexts. Processing versus production studies, together with evidence of parent input and social context, show how comprehension guides production and how multilingual exposure shapes language trajectories.
• Pragmatic development centers on intentional communication and discourse functions, tracing early performatives, holophrases, requests, and context-driven speech acts as scaffolds for later grammar [7] [6] [13] [14] [16].
• Deixis and locative semantics emerge through cross‑linguistic patterns, revealing a staged acquisition of spatial terms (in/on/under) and navigational references across English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Turkish [3] [12] [18].
• Processing vs production shows comprehension can precede production in telegraphic-age tasks, with evidence from syntax discrimination, sentence imitation, semantic interference, and intonation effects [5] [10] [11] [8].
• Parent input and social context shape early language trajectories, evidenced by mothers' speech patterns, prosodic features, and parent‑guided treatment programs [2] [19] [16] [14].
• Cross-language and multilingual contexts influence early language structure and use, with cross-language locatives and bilingual prosodic features shaping acquisition [12] [19] [15].
School-Age Input-Driven Language Development
1981 - 1987
Developmental Language Trajectories
1988 - 1995
Phonology-Contextual Literacy
1996 - 2002
School-Age Language Foundations
2003 - 2009
School-Age Language-Literacy Linkages
2010 - 2016
Input-Driven Bilingual Growth
2017 - 2023