Stability of Early Language Development of Verbally-Precocious Korean Children from 2 to 3 Year-old

조기언어발달 아동의 초기 언어능력의 안정성

The purpose of this study is to compare the complexity of language level between verbally-precocious and typically-developing children from 2 to 3 years-old. Participants were 15 children classified as verbally-precocious were scored at the mean 56.85(expressive language) and 88.82(receptive language), and another 15 children classified as typically developing did at the mean 33.51(expressive language) and 58.01(receptive language) on MCDI-K. Each child's spontaneous utterances in interaction with her caregiver were collected at three different times with 6 months interval. All of the utterances were transcribed and analyzed for the use of MLU and lexical diversity by using KCLA. Summarizing the overall results, verbally-precocious children had significantly higher language abilities than typically-developing children at each time, and there were significant differences between two groups in syntactic and semantic language development, showing that verbally-precocious children indicated distinctive MLU and lexical diversity. These results suggest a high degree of stability in precocious verbal status, with variations in language complexity during conversations contributing to later differences in their language ability.