The Vocabulary of Beginning Writers: Implications for Children with Complex Communication Needs

Abstract

One of the greatest challenges facing augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) professionals is providing children with complex communication needs with access to the vocabulary that they need in order to develop mature language and literacy abilities. The purpose of this study was to analyze the vocabulary used by typically developing early-elementary children in the United States and New Zealand when they write about self-selected topics, in order to inform practices with children with complex communication needs. The children's writing samples were compared across school ages and countries. The school age comparisons highlighted the relatively restricted range of vocabulary used by children in the earliest stages of writing development, and the country comparisons revealed differences in core vocabulary. The findings of this study hopefully will assist AAC professionals as they engage in selecting, prioritizing, and organizing vocabulary to support written language development in children with complex communication needs.

Monolingual and Bilingual Children With and Without Primary Language Impairment: Core Vocabulary Comparison

“…These small words are the framework of language (Banajee et al, 2003) because they are necessary for the formulation of sentences and to connect utterances, thus allowing for proper syntax (Marvin et al, 1994). A study by Clendon and Erickson (2008) established that the same is true for written language; a relatively small amount of core words was needed to represent signifi cant portions of children ' s written language samples.…”

“…The inability to create syntactically correct sentences, at those times when doing so is a priority (e.g., preparing for a classroom presentation) could negatively impact on a child ' s academic participation and self-esteem/image. Core words may be especially important for learning and using written language (Clendon & Erickson, 2008). Although children who use AAC can communicate face-to-face in a telegraphic style (e.g., without articles), the absence of core words within AAC systems could have a considerable impact on the development of their reading and writing skills.…”

Core vocabulary in written personal narratives of school-age children

“…The findings of Clendon and Erickson (2008) were substantiated by Clendon, Sturm, and Cali (2013), who analyzed vocabulary in written language samples from 124 children with typical development in kindergarten ( n = 65) and first grade ( n = 59). The investigators gathered 457 written samples (two to six samples per child) using self-selected topics on nine different writing tasks (labeling, story, narrative retell, plan, procedure, description, report, opinion, and explanation) with the most common being narrative retells (28%) and opinions (24%).…”

“…Another study that explored vocabulary use in writing included young children in first through fourth grade who wrote on self-selected writing topics across a 6-week period (Clendon & Erickson, 2008). This study compared 125 children from North Carolina to 113 children from New Zealand.…”

The Intersection of Culture and ICF-CY Personal and Environmental Factors for Alternative and Augmentative Communication

“…For example, morphological markers and structure words (e.g., auxiliaries, determiners, pronouns) have not traditionally been included on AAC devices, which can negatively affect language and literacy growth for beginning writers in English when their devices contain mostly nouns (Lund & Light, 2007;Sutton, Gallagher, Morford, & Shahnaz, 2000). For English, high frequency vocabulary and structure words have been compiled (Clendon & Erickson, 2008) but vocabulary development can differ by word type across languages. In English, for example, nouns are emphasized and are the most frequent type of word in early development, whereas verbs are likely to occur early in Spanish-speaking children (Bornstein et al, 2004).…”