36 Yoga for Speech-Language Development
(Gerber and Prizant 2000). At this stage children’s syntactic,
semantic, and pragmatic abilities are well developed. Children
have the sophistication to use language in subtle, nuanced ways
and to vary their language as a function of the situation at hand.
Simply put, they know what to say to whom, when, where, and
why. At this stage, children can both understand and produce
nonliteral forms of language such as idioms, jokes, and sarcasm.
In these forms, the literal meaning does not match the speaker’s
intended meaning. For example, the idiom “My father hit the
roof ” means the speaker’s father got angry, rather than climbed
up to the roof and banged on it. For further information about
nonliteral language development in children, the reader is referred
to Milosky (1994) and Nippold (2007).
Phonological awareness and emergent literacy
Phonological awareness, an aspect of the development of linguistic
form, refers to the ability to focus on the sounds that comprise
words and syllables. Phonological awareness is a metalinguistic
ability in which the child views the sounds of language as objects
of focus. Although predominantly a school-age acquisition,
preschoolers manifest some early metalinguistic skills including
awareness of rhyme and alliteration. They can identify, blend,
and segment sounds in larger units such as syllables and words.
These phonological awareness skills are relevant to emergent
literacy (Pence Turnbull and Justice 2017), the earliest period
that forms the foundation for later reading and writing. This
emerging process, which spans the infant, toddler, and preschool
years, eventually culminates in the ability to read and write, but,
unlike spoken language, requires direct instruction usually from a
teacher once children enter school. Emergent literacy, also called
the roots of literacy, includes behaviors and skills associated with
later successful reading. In addition to phonological awareness,