query about the pace of early child language development - follow up

Nan Ratner nratner at hesp.umd.edu
Fri Jul 31 17:03:57 UTC 2009


Actually, what is even more interesting is that this morning, as I got this e-mail inquiry, a student completing a thesis compared her current study of DSS in children to Lee's (1974) values: these more "current" children had values greatly in excess of Lee's normed values.

Nan


Nan Bernstein Ratner, Professor and Chairman
Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences
0100 Lefrak Hall
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
nratner at hesp.umd.edu
http://www.bsos.umd.edu/hesp/facultyStaff/ratnern.htm
301-405-4213
301-314-2023 (fax)

>>> "Philip Dale" <dalep at unm.edu> 7/31/2009 1:00 PM >>>

This is a fascinating question, especially in light of the research on the
"Flynn effect" - the fact that IQ and other tests have to be renormed
periodicaly because scores go up and the average would no longer be 100. And
certainly language is a core piece of IQ. A good place to start would be the
chapter by Dorothea McCarthy in the 1954 Handbook of Child Psychology. I had
this volume at one time, but have lost it in the course of moving. She
reports some figures about vocabulary size and length of utterance that
could potentially be compared to current figures. Of course
representativeness of samples wasn't as big a deal then as it is now. This
would be an excellent research topic.

Philip Dale, Professor and Chair
Speech & Hearing Sciences
University of New Mexico 

-----Original Message-----
From: info-childes at googlegroups.com [mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com] 
On Behalf Of Nan Ratner
Sent: Friday, July 31, 2009 10:56 AM
To: info-childes at googlegroups.com 
Subject: query about the pace of early child language development


A colleague of mine has asked a question that perhaps you can help me with.
He wonders if the rate of language development (e.g., ages at which major
milestones are achieved, or ages associated with values for measures such as
MLU) has "sped up" over the years? Aside from trying to compare current
studies that report a value for something like MLU with early work by Brown
and colleagues, for example, has this question been addressed in any formal
way?

best regards to all on the list,

Nan


Nan Bernstein Ratner, Professor and Chairman Department of Hearing and
Speech Sciences 0100 Lefrak Hall University of Maryland College Park, MD
20742 nratner at hesp.umd.edu 
http://www.bsos.umd.edu/hesp/facultyStaff/ratnern.htm 
301-405-4213
301-314-2023 (fax)








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