Consider these two sentences from Michaela:
A) Age 4 years: "I miss you, Nana!" (spoken over the phone to her grandmother who had returned home after a visit).
B) Age 4 years, 6 months: "I'm going to miss you, Nana" (spoken in person to her grandmother who was preparing to leave Michaela 's house to return to her own home).
What cognitive understandings lie behind Michaela's first utterance (a)? In other words, what kinds of things does she know and understand in order to produce this sentence appropriately? Now, look at the second utterance (b). What additional cognition is revealed? What kind of linguistic growth is evident?
Age 4: I miss you, Nana! Behind Michaela's cognitive understanding of her first utterance; she understand some basic rules of grammar. Age 4 yrs., 6 months: I am going to miss you Nana. Michaela is using longer sentences. What additional cognition is revealed. It revealed that her cognition development is advancing quickly. What kind of linguistic growth is evident? Michaela is able to deal more with complex thoughts and relationships.
She is also expressing the future.
In Michaela's first utterance (a), the cognitive understanding behind her sentence indicates that she has a basic understanding of the concept of missing someone. At age 4, she is able to recognize and express her emotions of missing her grandmother. She has grasped the idea that her grandmother is not physically present with her and as a result, she feels a sense of longing for her.
To produce this sentence appropriately, Michaela needs to have a certain level of knowledge and understanding, including:
1. Vocabulary: She needs to know the word "miss" and what it means in the context of longing for someone's presence.
2. Grammar: She needs to understand how to construct a sentence by using the verb "miss" correctly. She may have observed others using the verb in similar ways and learned to replicate it.
3. Contextual understanding: She needs to understand the situation and the fact that her grandmother is not present with her anymore. This implies that Michaela has a sense of time and can distinguish between past and present events.
Now let's move on to the second utterance (b). At the age of 4 years and 6 months, Michaela's sentence reveals additional cognitive growth. She is now able to express her emotions and thoughts using more complex language and structure.
In this second utterance, Michaela includes the phrase "I'm going to miss you." This shows that she has developed an understanding of future tense, indicating that she can anticipate and express emotions about situations that have not yet occurred.
This linguistic growth demonstrates that Michaela's language abilities have progressed. She has become more proficient in using language to convey her feelings and thoughts with greater precision and complexity. She is now able to express her emotions in a more detailed and forward-thinking manner than in her previous utterance.