Language and Cognitive Development

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RUNNING HEAD: Language and Cognitive Development Language and Speech Development: Preschool Years December 8, 2009 Kaplan University The language development of a child can vary greatly from child to child. In the psychological community, there has been a great deal of debate on whether language development can be solely attributed to a genetic, environment or both. Brown developed his Stages of Syntactic Development explains how a child’s syntactic development occurs. The development is measured by using the mean of length utterance or (MLU). Brown’s five stages of syntactic development are described as: (1) Semantic roles and grammatical relations which ranges from 12 to 26 months of age and has a MLU of 1.0 to 2.00; (2) Grammatical morphemes and the modulation of meanings which ranges from 27 to 30 months of age and has a MLU of 2.0 to 2.50; (3) Modalities of the simple sentence which ranges from 31 to 34 months of age and has a MLU of 2.5 to 3.00; (4) Embedding of one sentence within another which ranges from 35 to 40 months of age and has a MLU of 3.0 to 3.75; (5) Coordination of simple sentences and propositional relations which ranges from 41-46 months of age and has a MLU of 3.75 to 4.50 (Hulit & Howard, 2006). In order to prove the accuracy of this theory, I chose to interview the parents of Ryan* a little boy who is now 50 months of age. In the following essay I will show how his language development followed stages2 through 5 as outlined by Brown. Ryan’s parents describe him as a typically developing boy who always seemed aware of his environment and showed great interest in relating to and communicating with others. During stage 2 of language development we expect to see children to begin using pronouns, morphemes and auxiliary verbs. At this stage, Ryan was 30 months of age. Ryan used some grammatical

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