A Study On The Vocabulary Acquisition Process Of 3-6-year-old Chinese Children With High-risk Developmental Language Disorders

Developmental Language Disorder(DLD)refers to the,children who exhibit difficulty in learning words and sentence for expression in normal Language learning environment without hearing impairment,nonverbal intellectual impairments,or neurological and mental impairment.It is also called development language impairment or specific language impairment and developmental aphasia.Several studies have shown that the incidence of developmental language impairment in preschool is about 7.4%-9.4%,and given the population base of preschool children in China,the overall number of such children will be considerable.Children's difficulty in word learning is a serious problem that cannot be ignored.The purpose of this study was to explore the process of word learning in preschool children who are at a risk for developmental language disorder(AR)in the context of incidental(spontaneous)learning and intentional learning.this research combined incidental learning and intentional learning approaches,designed the task of novel word learning,taking the novel word that children have never been exposed to as a breakthrough point,and focused on the dynamic learning process of 12 novel words in natural situations.A total of 94 children were recruited in a preschool who completed a language screening battery and a novel word learning task.The language screening battery included grammar,word and pragmatic,novel word learning task including comprehension and production in both incidental and intentional learning contexts.To identify the children who are at-risk of DLD,the child must have two out of three Z scores that were either 1 SD below their age group mean,or one Z score that was 1.5 SD below the group mean,and combining with the incidence of children's language disorder is 7%-10%.Ten children met these criteria.Each of the 10 children was then matched with a TD child who is comparable in terms of sex,age and non-verbal IQ.The data analysis used Pearson correlation analysis,two-way ANOVA,regression analysis to explore AR children's psychological process of word learning and its predictive factors.Results of the analysis show :(1)in the psychological process of word learning,the word memorization and word expression of AR children are significantly lower than those of TD children,however,the performance of word comprehension is similar.(2)in the psychological process of word learning,the performance of word comprehension is similar between AR children and TD children.(3)compared with intentional learning,children are more likely to acquire vocabulary in incidental learning,and concentrated,repetitive teaching has no positive effect on the improvement of children's vocabulary expression level,and also the children's current grammar and vocabulary level can predict the memory level in the process of children's novel word learning.According to the findings of this study,the author proposes the following educational suggestions for the improvement of AR children's word :(1)keep teaching to be sensitivity to these children and pay attention to the creation of supportive language education environment,such as support children's specific needs of language learning;(2)utilize incidental learning context,in which teachers could repeat the target words in a distributed manner;(3)the language teaching content should be in line with children's current language experiences,and promotes the coherence and integrity of children's overall experiences.