Assignment: Vocabulary Development

The beginnings of oral language develop from birth. However, during the preschool years, the child's language growth makes great strides, and language acquisition is one of the young child's most amazing accomplishments. Vocabulary increases rapidly from a few hundred words to several thousand during the preschool years. Oral language also develops from one or two word utterances to complex expressions of abstract thought. The development of verbal communication follows a predictable and somewhat erratic pattern. Language growth is influenced by family situations and by the society in which the child lives. Other variables also influence the young child's speech and language, such as intelligence, sex, and overall health. Children with higher intelligence, from middle and upper socioeconomic background and who live in educationally stimulating environments, exhibit greater verbal skills than children from more impoverished environments (Reynolds & Ortony, 1980).

As a child matures, and the vocabulary size continues to grow, sentence length, called mean length of utterance (MLU) (Brown, 1973), also increases. The child uses grammatical rules more accurately, and more complex uses of the parts of speech emerge. The child's language use also reflects the cognitive and social growth occurring at the same time. Another influence is the amount of verbal interaction the child has with his or her parent or caregiver, as the child responds to both the social and language experience and expertise of another person.

For this Assignment, you examine the expressive vocabulary of a preschooler to determine his/her language development.

To prepare:

• Review this week's Learning Resources, focusing on lexical and morphological language development in children.

• Review the questions in the "Examining Vocabulary Development" document to familiarize yourself with the requirements of the Assignment. Then, analyze one of the Child Language Sample videos in the Learning Resources using the document.

The Assignment (2-3 pages):

Submit a 2- to 3-page paper in which you do the following:

• Identify which video you selected. Calculate the MLU of the child in the video using the guiding questions in the "Examining Vocabulary Development" document and the MLU normative chart.

• Explain how this data informs the language development of this child.

• Based on what you have learned so far, how does this child's vocabulary development correspond with normative development?

Be sure to support your explanations with specific references to the Learning Resources. Use proper APA format.