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Case Study Of Speaking Volumes

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The study I will be talking about is "Speaking Volumes": a longitudinal study of lexical and grammatical growth between 17 and 42 months by F. Labrell (2014). The study focuses on growth rates of vocabulary components such as nouns, verbs and grammatical words, such as prepositions, in 34 French children aged 17 months to 42 months, and how the growth rate of these variables correlates with the growth rates of other variables. There are four goals of the study: the first is to investigate the dynamics of vocabulary growth of the participant children; the second is to examine the pattern of grammatical growth; the third to compare the patterns of vocabulary growth and grammatical growth; and the final goal is to examine the nature of …show more content…

At the core of the dynamic systems approach is that each step in a system of variables is a function of the previous step, and so it changes because the components of the system affect each other. The key part of this system to be emphasized is that the author not only looked at trends in the group, but also at the data of individual children to investigate the idiosyncratic nature of this area of language acquisition.
The methodology of the study is as follows: the participants were thirty-four French children, (16 girls, 18 boys) between seventeen and forty-two months old. They were French monolingual and had no serious health problems or impediments to language acquisition, such as speech or hearing. The DLPF measure was used, designed specifically for French. The procedure consisted on indirect data-taking, as parents completed a questionnaire once a month from seventeen to thirty-five months, and twice a month from thirty-six to forty-two. This resulted in twenty-three measures per child although most were missing values, the average of which was 6 (26%). Five had no missing values, and two had only one. The author corrected for this missing data by replacing the missing value with the preceding measurement. The results were collated into a graph, with the variables of: nouns, verbs, adjectives, grammatical forms and total vocabulary (the sum of all variables). A group curve composed of the average of all the children's

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