Child Development 0 - 19

Children’s intellectual structures change through a variety of forms or stages. Each of those stages comes from the previous one. The child incorporates and transforms that stage (assimilation and accommodation) and becomes prepared to the next one.

An 18 month-old child can use approximately 50 words and compare to 24 month-old child having approximately 200 words (Balakas & Murray, 2013). It is found that toddlers have a better understanding of language and have the ability to follow directions than expressing words for themselves

Between the ages of 0-3 months children react to certain sounds with startle (moro reflex). Children begin to react to sounds which are close by, by the age of 2-4 months children will begin to develop distance hearing. Children are then awakened by loud noises, sounds and voices. Towards the end of the third month a baby is able to recognise there mother's voice and will stop crying in order to listen to to voices and there own sounds. Babies are unable to control there motor movements, therefore most of there actions are reflexes. One of the most important reflexes for there speech development is the rhythmic suck-swallow pattern. Babies of this age are now able to move in response to voices and are able to express there feelings by cooing and gurgling.

* an explanation of the reasons why children and young people’s development may not follow the expected pattern explain how each factor may affect a child’s/YP’s development.

It is thought therefore, that the stimulation of adults and older children communicating with them, even though the baby cannot yet understand, it just as important as everything else done with them. Language is part of the everyday sounds that babies listen to, even though they may not participate, and songs can be a lovely and effective element of language that they are thought to enjoy. Around 1 year old they will start to attempt to speak, but often their pronunciation is unclearand the words are typically used singly, by themselve, rather than in sentences. In the 12 months following , they start bringing words together into short phrases and sentences, and as they use language more, their vocabularly rapidly increases. Concepts such as plurals and negatives come in the next 12 months, and sentences become better formed, although grammatical errors in speech are also likely, especially as English is a fairly 'irregular' language, so verbs such as eat become eaten, ad can be commonly mistaking by

Although children babble, children do not typically produce many words during the first year of life. Children begin to babble and coo as early as 2-months, the sounds children produce rarely have meaning to the child. During this time, children can also produce protowords, or words that have consistent meaning to the child but have no similarities to the actual word. These protowords, such as “binky” for “pacifier”, are the precursor to word and vocabulary development for a child.

( Turnbull & Justice, 2012, p.16) There are several resource online that provide a nice graphical view of what parents of toddlers can expect as their child ages for example Tom while at the age of 20 months should already have said his first word and should be infact learning 10 - 20 new words per day. However like all things children have spikes and flat lines so it is not necessary to worry if he is a little behind or ahead as there is no strict time by which thing must happen. 18 - 24 months Tom should be combining 2 words to make statements about his need and wants. He should also be able to name body parts when asked along with following simple directions. For example asking Tom to bring his book from the playroom. At 24 - 30 Tom should be able to use sentences that are 2-4 words long and answer questions. At this time he should also start applying plural ending and his vocabulary should include a total of 200 words. At 30 - 36 months Tom will have learned around 450 words, has a concept of time, and can answer question with complete

age of three can speak at least 200 words and by the time they are five years of age they can

Child development is the emotional, psychological and biological changes that occur in human being. These changes begin once the child is born and progress through the adolescent stage. the changes are usually predictable however they are usually unique to every child and the rate of progression as well differs from one child to another. The changes in development may be influenced by prenatal life events and to some extent by genetic factors (Lillard et al., 2013). It is important to note that child development is categorized into different periods, since each development period has some individual differences.

The second stage following the babbling stage is the one word stage. The average age of a child is approximately 9-18 months where the pattern is “single words: 50 or so common words in the environment (Denham- Lobeck, 40)”. Usually the words produced by the subject are verbs and nouns. Some of those verbs and nouns could be pronounced the same way the adult pronounces it, although other words will sound distorted as shown in (1) and (2) below. Another pattern infants tend to follow in this stage is that of overextension, where they stretch out the meaning of words, and underextension, where the infants will have a less significant understanding of a word compared to an adult. This is shown in (3) and

At this stage a child will continue to discover new objects and develop to find out what they do, such as what different toys do and sound like. They will begin to use objects appropriately, an example of this can be their feeding bottle or noise associated toys. A child’s language at this stage will rapidly be developing as they will be able to use and say on average 40 words as well as understand them, alongside various instructions such as “eat this” of “have a drink” in most cases these instructions will be understood when accompanied by gestures such as holding a sandwich where they can see it of giving them their cup.

As soon as infants are born they immediately begin innately paying attention to language. There are several major achievements in language as infants grow and develop. First in phonology, infants begin babbling using vowel-like sounds at 3-8 months, early consonants at 5-8 months, and CV syllables from 5-10 months. CV syllables means syllables with a consonant and a vowel, and are more complex for infants to produce. They also acquire prosodic abilities, or the ability to find patterns of intonations and stress in language. An infant proves unable to produce multiword utterances and therefore contains no syntax, but they begin to formulate single words beginning around 9-14 months of age. To count as first words, they must be “true words”,

They found that four children aged 20 -30 months had no spoken language, seven children aged 24-66 months had single words, 19 children aged 26-74 months were beginning to combine words, eights children aged 60-82 months were combining words consistently and three children aged 61-76 months were consistently combining words. The results of this study reveal clear evidence that the children although at different ages had different levels of language skills, some more developed than those younger or older than them. This study also shows how among the children aged 61 months or above, language ability ranged from single words to words being combined most of the time (Slater,

“Development is a dynamic and reciprocal process that occurs between the child’s internal and external environments” (Burns, 2013, p44). The assessment of a child’s development is important because it helps to recognize the normal and abnormal infants, children, and adolescent’s performance when compared with others of the same age

Infancy: At this stage, infants have no language and thinking. Babble is increasingly being understood as an essential precursor to speech. They explore the surrounding environment by feeling and action, and form the concept of object permanence gradually. They have sharp sense of hearing, are good at imitating. Infants could distinguish the change in tone, tone and tone. A nine-month infants can understand some nouns, such as "mom", "ball", "dog" and so on. In general, a twelve-month infant can say at least 50 words.