Amount and Rate of Talking of Young Children

Articulation rate in preschool children: a 3‐year longitudinal study

“…The findings contrast with those of other researchers cited previously (e.g. Dawson 1929, Olson and Koetzle 1936, Ryan 1992.…”

“…This supports the findings of an earlier study by Hutt, cited in Amster and Starkweather (1987), in the speech of children between the ages of 2;6 and 5;5. In contrast Olson and Koetzle (1936) found that boys spoke faster than girls at comparable ages, while Kowal et al (1975) found no significant gender differences in subjects at seven age levels ranging from 5;10 to 18;1. Similarly no significant gender differences in speech rate were found in the studies by Amster (1984) and Walker et al (1992) in preschool children, however, in both these studies gender was found to interact with other variables; in the Amster study with utterance length and age (3-year-old boys) and by Walker et al on one measure of variability (log variance) in both 3-and 5-year-olds in the phone/s analysis.…”

“…The majority of studies are of older children and adults. Only a few studies have been specifically directed to examining rate in normally developing young children, those of Olson and Koetzle (1936), Amster (1984), Pindzola et al (1989), Walker et al (1992) and Hall et al (1999). While data on children 5 years and older are reported by Dawson (1929), Kowal et al (1975), Tingley and Allen (1975) and Haselager et al (1991), with the exception of an investigation by Kent and Forner (1980), using a phrase repetition task, no data could be located on speech rate in 6-year-olds.…”

An investigation of the accuracy of momentary time sampling procedures with time series data

“…The latter procedures are ones which have had a long history of use punctuated by periods of interest in their accuracy (e.g. Goodenough, 1928Goodenough, , 1930Olson, 1929Olson, , 1931Loomis, 1931 ;Arrington, 1932Arrington, , 1943Beaver, 1932;Parten, 1932;Manwell & Mengert, 1934;Olson & Koetzle, 1936;Olson & Wilkinson, 1936;Murphy, 1937;Repp et al, 1976). Of more interest to practitioners, however, is the intermittent procedure developed by Bindra & Blond (1958) known now as momentary time sampling (MTS).…”

Time-sampling studies of child behavior.

“…In the younger nursery group, children talked to other children in about 4 per cent of the total time they were observed; in the older nursery group, in 12 per cent; in the kindergarten group, in 22 per cent and 17 per cent for boys and girls respectively; and in the first-grade group, in 33 per cent and 23 per cent respectively, for boys and girls.4 Since the differences between the means of the paired age groups are all at least four times las great as the standard error of the difference and the groups were observed under highly comparable conditions, we can safely assume that these are genuine age differences.5 4 While the general fact of increase in social language with age during the preschool period is reported in many studies of language and social behavior in young children, it is impossible to relate the findings of the present investigation concerning amount of social speech at different ages to those of other related studies because of differences in method of recording language frequency. Olson and Koetzle (44) report results as to amount of talking in young children in terms of the average number of words spoken by children in a senior nursery group and a kindergarten group in thirty one-minute observation periods; Fisher (19), in terms of the average number of remarks per hour.…”