Language Production and Language Perception: Development in Children Aged 1 to 5

Children’s speech develops over the first several years of their lives, and the specific language abilities are different from one year of age to another. Children in an elicited response experiment were found to have successively higher levels of language facility at successively higher ages, with specific exceptions for children who displayed language acquisition above the expected levels for their ages. The speech production abilities of children in this study roughly paralleled the speech perception of the same children. This study examined and compares the language production and the language perception of a group of children aged 1:3 to 5:11.

Debbie Barry and her husband live in southeastern Michigan with their two sons and their two cats. The family enjoys exploring history through French and Indian War re-enactment and through medieval re-enactment in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). Debbie grew up in Vermont, where she heard and collected many family stories that she enjoys retelling as historical fiction for young audiences. Debbie graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in dual majors of social sciences with an education concentration and of English in 2013. She is pursuing her master's degree in linguistics, specializing in teaching English as a second language (TESOL), at Oakland University, in Rochester, Michigan.