Speech Development

For this project, I observed a day care class near my home in Denville NJ. For the safety and protection of the children I was asked to not take any pictures of use a recording device I brought with me, but was allowed to spend about an hour observing the children interacting with each other. Their age range was from about a year and 1/2 to three years old. While I was there observing there was no formal structure to the classroom, rather the children were allowed to move about the classroom as they please playing with one another. The room had all the essentials of a daycare room: bright colored drawings hanging from the walls, a multitude of toys from the children (both "boy" and "girl" toys such as a kitchen set and cars) and tables for the children to sit at during the time which they were receiving instructions from the teacher or having snack.
One of the first things that I took note of while the children were playing is that they were all familiar with each others names. I had assumed that at this point, as adults do when they can not remember someone's name they would just start speaking to their friends and wait to get their attention. This was not the case though and the majority of the kids called their friends by their first names. Also, the children were asked to refer to me as "Miss Amber" as they did with their teachers, "Miss Kate" and "Miss Kathy". The children were also very familiar with their surroundings and could point out and identity most of the objects in the room. Some of the new additions to the room such a holiday decorations were less familiar and most of the children were puzzled when asked to identify a menorah, however this could have less to do with language and more to do with their religious (or non) upbringing. One of the largest problems that these children seemed to encounter with their speech is in the use of pronouns. They were able to use "I" and "me" correctly but when using other personal pronouns such as "she" and "he" and even more so "they" "theirs" and "its" they become extremely confused and interchange them often. Another problem that the children encountered was using the use of plurals and past tense of verbs. "I go for a walk with my mom" is what one of the children said and when asked how many pets they own one child said "I have three cat". The lack of the pluralization and inability to form past tense of verbs (even more an irregular verb as seen here-go should have become went instead of go-ed as may have been expected, but NO tense change was attempted). The one area that the children seemed to have the most word relation with is in relation to themselves. They could point out parts of the body and tell you a lot about themselves such as where they live, what color hair they have, if they have brothers or sisters and so on.
It seems that the children observer ed have a very good beginning for their lanauge. There was one child who was extremely quite and hardly spoke with anyone else during my visit. Maybe he was just shy, but at this stage one also starts to wonder if there is a speech problem. However, the children seemed to be following expected speech mistakes and patterns from their age group.