Language Development in Children - Assignment Example

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN 1. Introduction The basic premise of this article lies in understanding the development and contribution of theories which aims at investigating the factors influencing reading - related skills among young children across various age groups (pre - schoolers, kindergarten) as well as the significance, relevance and contribution of factors which affects the emergent literacy skills among school - age children. In the process, it dismisses the old belief that learning difficulties among children occurs on account of significant involvement of visual-perceptual systems or hypothesized subtle vision difficulties, and instead attributes it to a weakness in phonological processing abilities. A wide range of seminal studies are presented in this article which largely focuses on the role and impact of phonological awareness on learning abilities among school age children. The key purpose of the studies presented was to examine the contribution and impact of all the three domains of phonological processing abilities namely, phonological awareness, phonological memory and lexical access, in preschool children and to determine the nature of the underlying structure of these phonological abilities in young children. The outcome of such studies suggest that there exist significant developmental differences in the nature of phonological processing abilities between older and younger children and such differences may widen with age and as the children progress from pre readers to skilled readers. The studies offer a wider platform and credible resources in the form of evidence acquired through formal studies, to facilitate further research in the field of ascertaining the causes that affect learning abilities in children and hence provide opportunities for developing a robust framework that seeks to eliminate and overcome such setbacks. 2. Methods The methods employed in conducting such studies are studied in terms of three key elements: the participants involved in the studies, the apparatus or materials used and the procedures employed, which are discussed in brief below: 2.1. Participants Two groups of preschool children participated in the study: the first group of children comprised of a total of 129 younger preschool children aged 27 to 47 months. 57% the children belonging to the younger sample were Caucasian, 36% of them were African American and 7% were Latino / Hispanic. Of the 129 children, 63 were girls and 66 - boys. Of the younger sample, 64% of them were recruited from fee-for-service preschools which primarily served middle to upper middle income families and the remaining 36% were recruited from subsidized child care centers which served low to lower middle income families. The second group comprised of 304 (149 girls, and 155 boys) older preschool children ranging from 48 to 71 months, of which 57% were African American, 42% were Caucasian and 1% were Asian and Latino / Hispanic. From the older sample, 39% were recruited from fee-for-service preschools while 61% belonged to subsidized child care centers. 2.2. Apparatus or Materials Used Eight measures were used to assess children’s phonological awareness, each of which included a minimum of 2 practice trials followed by correction, explanation, and re -administration if the child gave an incorrect answer or by confirmation and explanation if the child gave the correct answer. Within each measure, all 10 or 11 test trials were administered to all children so that their phonological awareness across all levels of linguistic complexity was assessed and no feedback was given on any of the trials. All correct responses were real words. There were two measures of children’s sensitivity to rhyme - the rhyme oddity measure and the rhyme matching measure. Furthermore, three other measures required children to blend sounds to form a new word. The Blending Words measure required children to combine single-syllable words to form a compound word. For the purpose, two practice items were presented both verbally and with pictures. The Blending Syllables and Phonemes measure required children to combine word elements to form a word for which they were presented with a puppet. The Blending Multiple Choice measure also required children to combine word elements to form a word. Three other additional measures were employed whereby the children were required to delete parts of a word to form a new word, these include: The Elision Words measure which required the children to delete a single-syllable word from a compound word for which the children were given two practice items both verbally and with pictures; The Elision Syllables and Phonemes measure which required children to say a word minus a specific sound and The Elision Multiple Choice measure also required children to say a word minus a syllable or phoneme. 2.3. Procedures After parents provided informed consent for their children to participate, trained research assistants tested children individually in their preschool or child-care center. Test administration for individual children was conducted over four to six 20-min sessions within a 2- to 3-week period to ensure optimal performance on all tasks. Children in both samples completed eight measures of phonological awareness, two measures of phonological memory, three measures of lexical access, two measures of oral language, three measures of nonverbal cognitive abilities, two letter-knowledge measures, and two text-reading measures. The order of test administration varied across children. In the rhyme oddity measure the children were presented with three pictures in a row that were named by the examiner and were asked to select the one which did not rhyme with the other two. In the rhyme matching measure the children were presented with pictures and were asked to indicate the one which rhymed with two additional pictured words. In the blending words measure the children were asked to combine single - rhyme words to form a combined word. During practice trials, the examiner emphasized the nature of the task by putting the pictures together while presenting the trial. In the blending multiple choice measure the children were asked to combine word elements to form a single word. The examiners used puppets as an aid to facilitate this task. The Elision Words measure required children to delete a single-syllable word from a compound word for which the children were required to delete a single syllable word from a compound word. For this purpose they were presented with verbal as well as pictorial clues. 3. Results Descriptive statistics for the younger and older children on the oral language, cognitive ability, and print knowledge measures were assessed and evaluated. For both groups, i.e. the younger as well as the older children, the mean standard scores on the oral language and cognitive ability measures were found to be within the average to low-average range. The younger children received somewhat higher standard scores on the two vocabulary measures and the three subtests of the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale as compared to the older children. The majority of children in the younger group had very limited print knowledge. 47% of these children had no / limited awareness of letter names, 92% were unaware about letter sounds, and 94% were unable to read words on either the WRMT-R Word Identification subtest or the test of high-frequency word reading. On the contrary, children in the older group demonstrated significantly higher levels of print knowledge. Only 16% of these children were unaware about the letter names, and 63% were unaware of letter sounds. However, 85% of these children were nonreaders as evidenced by a score of zero on both the WRMT-R Word Identification subtest, wherein 91% of the children had a score of zero, and 87 % of them had a score of zero in the test of high-frequency word reading. The indices of reliability for the phonological processing measures, of both younger and older children, were observed to be between moderate to high. Tasks involving chance component were found to have relatively lower reliabilities, and a significant within group variability was observed on all phonological processing variables for both groups of children. In terms of phonological awareness, the older children scored significantly higher than the younger lot. 4. Discussion The various studies conducted by the researchers provide credible evidence, which tend to further substantiate the previous studies that investigated the structure of phonological processing abilities among young school age children. The studies successfully demonstrated that the phonological processing abilities of English speaking preschoolers are highly influenced by phonological awareness / memory as well as lexical access. The studies were consistent, among the children aged between 2 and 5 years, throughout the wide range of subjects tested, irrespective of their backgrounds and other dissimilar factors. It further substantiated the fact that phonological processing abilities with regard to reading and learning among preschool and kindergarten children help in facilitating their early development and play a significant role in screening developing appropriate intervention and frameworks for improvement and development. In conclusion, it could be safely presumed that there exists a high probability of the existence of a minimum of one prospective condition required for the development of phonological awareness and memory among young children which could further be explored through systematic longitudinal and intervention studies. Read More