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 and 

Vocabulary Development

Language Development

Here’s the link to the video I chose for my research on vocabulary development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFguWOufFrs. The involved a conversation between an adult and a three-year-old baby. The former asks the questions to the child and receive the responses in the form of verbal. The ability of the kid to answer the questions correctly shows that he can interpret the issues and provide the most appropriate answer. Although he can recite what he has heard before like reciting the 26 alphabets, he does better when the aunt accompanies him in the song. He can tell the historical events including his age and even the next one that he will be turning after celebrating the next birthday. 

The child can construct more complex, longer, and intellectual conversation. Unlike in the earlier stage where children pronounce a few words per utterance, the kid can contract a long sentence to answer the questions. The complex answers create a complex conversation that an adult can easily comprehend and engage. As well, they express their feeling together with an illustrative performance. For instance, when he is asked how the robots react, he illustrates how they move around from one place to another. Additionally, with the increase in the knowledge and learning ability, he can understand more complex questions than those in the ages below three. Also, he can create sentences by joining different words by joining words. 

The correspondent with Normative Development

According to the normative development, children from the age of three months to three years undergo different learning processes. At the period of three months, their leaning is through the exploration of the visual world. Besides recognizing the difference between objects, they are as well able to smile and imitate what they see adults doing. Between four and six months, he starts identifying the family members, especially the mother (Datan & Ginsberg, 2013). They enjoy being in their hands and they can roll from back to stomach. Separation anxiety is experienced between seven and nine months. They can crawl, grab objects around them, and even distinguish the various voices they hear. 

At the age of one, children start making steps, especially using furniture. They develop an interest in feeding themselves, throwing things around, and trying to maintain themselves in a sitting position (Gleason & Ratner, 2017). Besides, they develop language thus able to speak a few words together with an understanding of simple requests and commands. Activities such as running, eating with spoons, scribbling with crayons are developed when a kid is between one and two years. They can make a few sentences and even show the willingness to obey commands. The age of three fully attains language development. One can express emotions, sing songs, and engage in conversations with long sentences and paragraphs. 

Child development in this child fully corresponds with the normative development. The kid in the question can construct substantial sentences to explain how the robot tends to react. Again, he can express his emotions to the person they are engaging in a conversation. Regarding the ability to sing, pronounces the alphabets in the form of a song both as an individual and in the company of the adult speaker. He also expresses excitement by jumping around while explaining his point. 

References

Datan, N., & Ginsberg, L. H. (Eds.). (2013). Life-span developmental psychology: Normative life crises. Elsevier.

Gleason, J. B., & Ratner, N. B. (2017). The development of language (9th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFguWOufFrs; Mixed Receptive-Expressive Language Delay; MLU= Total number of morphemes / Total number of utterances, MLU= 78/42, 1.8571.

The paper need the MLU data chart for video.