Language production - Essay Example

If a child is unsure of a word, any of these techniques can make it easier to understand and learn from. Educators have told us for decades that reading with your children is the best way to assure their love of reading and the written and spoken word. They learn from your reading and foster a desire to learn this task for themselves. The basis may be biological, cognitive or interactionist in nature, as it works along all theories, much as the other skills that preschool children use in order to acquire their knowledge.

Brown’s Stages of Language Development and the Preschool Child. Roger Brown set out specific stages to explain how the preschool child acquires the knowledge of language and speech production. His stages are age based and rely on building upon what you have learned in the previous stage in order to move on. My son, Jack, has just celebrated his fifth birthday, and as the last of my three children, I think that I was more aware of his ability to form language at what seemed to be an earlier age than the others.

Whether that was in my head or not I don’t know, but I believe that he had more people to model, being the baby certainly has some advantages in learning language. Instead of just his parents or other caregivers to learn from, Jack had older siblings who were constantly modeling and showing him the path to follow in order to ‘be like them’. It seems that once language starts to develop, it advances quite fast. As some of the stages only span a few months, this would suggest that there could be some overlap in the timing of some of the traits learned, give or take a week and you’re into the next stage.

This makes remembering exactly what he could and could not say at each stage quite tricky, so these will be loose estimates only. When Jack was about two years old, so almost into stage 2, he would ask “mommy go?” Then later it turned into “where mommy go?” (about 2.2 years) then progressed to “where is mommy going?” (Two and a half years) to the question I get asked now, which seems to go on forever, trying not only to inquire where I am going, but where, when will I be back, how long will I be gone for, etc.

Jack had a good grasp of negative form phrases, seemingly from the beginning. He’d tell me he didn’t want to nap with “no nap” at about two years old. By the time he was a little older, probably around two and a half, he would try to explain why he wanted no nap, saying things like “I no sleepy” which later became “I am not sleepy” to when he was in the last stage at around three, three and a half when I’d get a diatribe about how he wasn’t sleepy and it wasn’t fair that he had to nap.

Pronouns never did give him much trouble, he seemed to pick the right one for the situation from a really early age, and he always had his older sister to correct him should he be wrong. He seemed to apply such corrections pretty well, even when he was quite young. As for clauses, Jack