Meeting milestones helps us understand where a child may begin to have difficulties with their speech and language development.ĭuring your child’s first three years, their brain develops rapidly. Understanding how language skills typically develop requires looking into the critical first three years of your child’s life. During typical development, children are beginning to understand language before they can produce it.Įxpressive Language and Receptive Language in Typically Developing Children Receptive language includes listening and following directions. Think of receptive language as input – your child’s ability to understand and comprehend spoken language and the language they read. Receptive language is the process of understanding information, whether through:Ĭhildren typically acquire various receptive language elements much faster than expressive language, making their receptive language vocabulary larger than their expressive language. Listening is an essential component of receptive language but involves much more than that. Expressive language use is eventually forming these thoughts into words and sentences that make sense and are grammatically correct. This output of language is your child’s ability to express their desires and needs through verbal or nonverbal communication. Think of expressive language as an output. Expressive language utilizes many forms as your child gets older to communicate with family, peers, and caregivers. While talking is the main form of expressive language, other strategies can be just as effective. The use of expressive language can be as simple as pointing to a person, food, or toy. Receptive language and expressive language in children with autismĮxpressive language is your child’s ability to communicate their thoughts and feelings through the use of:.The differences between receptive language and expressive language.While language disorders can affect their receptive language or expressive language, it’s essential to know the difference between them to begin addressing their receptive language or expressive language difficulties. When receptive language or expressive language does not develop correctly in your child, they may experience trouble understanding and reading others, sharing with others, and may develop a language disorder. Both expressive language and receptive language help us understand the world around us while sharing our wants, needs, thoughts, and feelings. Language encompasses how we create words and how we put them together, their meanings, and how we can apply language in various social situations. Findings suggest that at-risk children who receive relatively large doses of a curriculum (as measured in days of attendance during the academic year) that emphasizes quality language instruction may experience accelerated expressive language growth during pre-kindergarten.Language development begins in the early stages of infancy and helps us communicate with one another. The impact of the language curriculum and LST exposure was moderated by children's classroom attendance, in that the language curriculum accelerated language growth for children who attended preschool regularly a similar effect was seen for LST exposure.Īdoption of a comprehensive language curriculum may provide a value-added benefit only under highly specific circumstances.
Children's growth in expressive language was assessed using measures derived from language samples in the fall and spring, specifically percent complex utterances, rate of noun use, number of different words, and upper bound index.Ĭhildren's language skill in the fall, socioeconomic status (household income), and daily attendance served as significant, positive predictors of their language skill in the spring.
Teachers' fidelity of implementation was monitored using structured observations conducted 3 times during the academic year. Comparison teachers maintained their prevailing curriculum a total of 96 children were enrolled in these classrooms. Treatment teachers implemented the experimental curriculum for an academic year a total of 100 children were enrolled in their classrooms. As part of this larger purpose, this study identified child-level predictors of expressive language outcomes for children attending at-risk preschool programs as well as main effects for children's exposure to the language curriculum and its active ingredients-namely, teacher use of language stimulation techniques (LSTs e.g., open questions, recasts, models).įourteen preschool teachers were randomly assigned to 2 conditions. The primary purpose of this study was to investigate child impacts following implementation of a comprehensive language curriculum, the Language-Focused Curriculum (LFC Bunce, 1995), within their preschool classrooms.