Speech Development

Speech Development
 
The development of children, when involving speech, is a psychological concept that has been studied in order to determine how diverse environments impact a child’s speech ability and development.  I spent my time studying two psychological studies, which have to do with how different environments affect the way children’s speech develops and changes over time. One such study was conducted by Valerie Whittlesey Lawrence and examined how speech developed differently due to race and economic class. She conducted her study in the United States, specifically Philadelphia, in June 1997. She examined 36 parent-child relationships/pairs with 9 pairs in each group separated by race and social class. Each parent-child pair was then observed in their home by being shown pictures, which they had to discuss and identify.
Maya Hickmann and Anne-Katharina Ochsenbauer spent their time on the other study in Germany in 2010. This experiment studied effect of language properties on children’s perception and description of events in motion. The study was conducted on 60 children who reside in Germany, who only spoke one language. The children were divided into five different age groups and with both boys and girls in each, who were tested in kindergarten and elementary schools of Augsburg. Also a control group of adults was tested from the University of Munich. The subjects were shown cartoons on a computer performing different actions and the subjects were asked to describe what was happening. The results were then compared to that of French and English children to determine how language impacts the way children organize their representations and thoughts.
Both studies were experiments and were neither single nor double-blind because the subjects knew that they were being tested and there was no need for one group to not receive the test or given a placebo. Both experiments were done on children and adults. However, in the studied conducted by Lawrence,...