Language Development in Early Childhood

Maddison Ward

March 28, 2022

 Language Activities With A Child (age 2-5)

Language
I brought in my own child, Eleanor, who is 2 years and 9 months old. She has a genetic
condition that makes communication difficult so we are going off the basis that she is delayed.
She’s advancing with speech therapy, but there’s still a communication barrier greater than
children of her own age experience. We sat at the kitchen table and talked in one of our self-
guided speech therapy sessions.
When asked what her name is, she responded with “Noni” which is her version of her
nickname “Nori”. In speech, we had to shorten her name so she would have an easier time
learning how to say it. I then asked her how old she was. She was unable to tell me and
responded with “Noni” again, but when prompted to say she was two, she responded with “two”
along with putting her hand up and attempting to hold up two fingers. I asked her what her
favorite color was and this was a question she found difficult. She didn’t understand what I was
asking until I asked it a second time and then listed off some colors to help guide her towards the
answer. She then answered “blue”.
To continue, I asked what her favorite toy was. She did not respond to this question at all
despite my prompting towards what the answer might be. I took out my phone to show her a
picture of our family. This was an easy task for her. We went through and named each person.
Although the speech was unclear at times, I understand what she says because I’m her mother
and am around it daily. These names were not clearly enunciated, but she knew what everyone
was called. When asked what her favorite thing to do was and what she did yesterday, there was
no answer. It’s clear that some of the questions are too big for her to understand how to respond.

Vocabulary
For our book activity, we chose to buy “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?”.
This seemed like a good choice due to it having a lot of pictures and colors involved. She was
able to name off colors in the book although some of the objects and animals were challenging.
She has an easier time learning colors than she does learning the words of things around her.
The book lists brown bear, red bird, yellow duck, blue horse, green frog, purple cat, white
dog, black sheep, a goldfish, and a teacher. Of these, she was able to list all colors, but was only
able to name bear, bird, duck, cat, dog, and fish. The others were more challenging for her. The
style of drawings in the book may be harder to interpret for a child of her age, but I didn’t give
her any prompting when reading so all of her labels were given independently. She listed 7 out of
10 objects and 10 out of 10 colors.

Home Literacy Environment

Because I am her mom, I will be answering the home literacy questions on my own.
We answer her questions often. We sometimes correct her speech when she makes an
error that is fixable. Her communication is hard to understand and she has a hard time double

 using a consonant. When saying “table”, she instead uses “bable”. We correct to slow her down
and help her hear the mistakes, but we don’t swell on it. We read about picture books her her
often. We read around 5 a day.
We sometimes take her to the bookstore. We have a lot of books here and others, we usually
order online.
We describe objects frequently during our self-guided speech therapy sessions at home.
We sometimes talk about what she sees on tv.
We encourage her to make up her own stories often. Usually with her, this is done with gestures
more than words. We encourage pretend play with her toys and she’s learning a lot about what
that means.

Summary of Activity
My activities with Eleanor proved what I already know as her mom, but it was good to sit
down and see what she’s learning and how much she understands. I don’t believe her vocabulary
is age-appropriate but I do believe that she is working hard to catch up. She used some of the
new words we discussed in the book which proved to me that she’s absorbing new information
all the time and is on a good growth pattern despite the speech delay. The home literacy
environment matches her growth although it does not match her delay. Her delay is caused by
her genetic condition and the home literacy environment is kept strong so that her delay doesn’t
worsen.
Eleanor had a good attitude the whole time and was happy to have the hands-on attention
that she loves. She did not perform as a “typical child” of her age. Environment is so important
to language development and she is in a great environment for that. She has a therapy room
where we play with toys and talk without the distractions of the rest of the house and I think that
assists her in moving past speech challenges by allowing her the time and space to work on it.
The biggest impact on her speech is her condition. We work everyday to try to make our impact
of a great home literacy environment even bigger. There are always challenges.

Scientific Article Review and Analysis

In “Assessing the Home Literacy Environment: Relationships to Child Language

Comprehension and Expression” by Ljubica Marjanovič Umek, Anja Podlesek, and Urška
Fekonja, the reasoning for the study were clear. They wanted to see how the home literacy
environment affected children and their language development. They were trying to create a
scale to assist them in finding the families with poor home literacy environments in order to offer
them assistance in improving it for their child’s language skills. Their hypothesis was that the
home literacy environment and exposure to literature directly affected a child’s ability to speak
and their language development and vocabulary.
In this study, a sample was taken of 353 3-year-olds who attended preschool in Slovenia
in the first measurement, but in the second only 308 participated. They documented the mother’s
level of education and provided a strong range. The children were all between 43 and 58 months

 old. 51% of the study sample were girls and 49% were boys. They did not mention race or
ethnicity, but all of the participants were from various regions of Slovenia.
In completing the study, they used questionnaires that the mothers filled out along with a
study of the children and how they could make up a story to a picture book. They examined
factors such as the mother’s level of education along with the home literacy environment they
provided. They looked at how these factors correlated with the children’s vocabulary level and
their ability to create a story. They followed up after five years with another questionnaire for the
mothers.
The findings were consistent with their hypothesis in that the home literacy environment
was very closely tied to how a child’s language developed along with their ability to use their
language and vocabulary to independently tell a story. There were correlations with mothers of a
higher education level having more access to literature and materials that could aid in the
developments of their child. They also found that the participation of the parents in reading them
and giving the child access to theater and puppet shows allowed the child to further develop their
language skills and helped them in letter recognition. Overall, the study was successful in
proving that the environment a child grows up in helps to stimulate their learning and directly
influences the success of their language skills.