Word comprehension and expression in children from 24 to 47 months

Vocabulary development is a very important part of a child's language development process. In this regard, the biggest changes occur in the first years of the child's life, which is why focus on children aged between 2 and 4 in this survey. By the fourth year, however, children manage to pronounce an average of 1,000 words. Having a wider vocabulary allows children to form sentences with more words. As a matter of fact, researchers have found a stronger correlation between the breadth of vocabulary and connecting words into sentences than between the age of the child and connecting words into sentences. Most four-year-olds are able to pronounce all of the sounds, except for sibilants and /r/, and fewer simplifications of words can be perceived in their speech. Their speech is better understood even by people they do not know. Nevertheless, one ought to remember that vocabulary is influenced by a variety of environmental and genetic factors, as well as any special needs children might have. Our research dealt with the vocabulary of children aged between 24 and 47 months. The aim of our research was to analyze the results achieved by children in the field of word comprehension and in the field of word production. We were also interested in how successful children were in understanding and expressing nouns and verbs and if there were differences between boys and girls. In the empirical part, we used the first three tasks of the New Reynell Developmental Language Scale (NRDLS-SI) to analyze the results of 11 children (four boys and seven girls) with regular speech and language development. The survey showed there were statistically significant differences between the children's scores on tests of language comprehension and language production. We also found statistically significant differences on the test of comprehension and expression of nouns and verbs, which means that more nouns than verbs appear in the speech of children between the ages of two and four. We also examined the influence of gender on vocabulary development and found some minor gender differences between the sexes (especially in language production). Girls scored slightly higher than boys, but the gender difference was not statistically significant