Child's language development affects the level of intelligibility of speech in the child's pre-school age, and educators and parents are well aware of this. If we, the adults, want the child to gradually develop and maximize his speech, we must give appropriate incentives both in the field of speech and language, as well as with other areas of child development. This means that we have to read a lot to the child, we have to tell him stories, and describe things to him, sing songs to him, and together with him search for rhymes and give him a chance to narrate, describe, sing, because this is the only way for him to have an appropriate environment in which he will feel safe and accepted, and in which he will be able to learn the language spoken by his close relatives. When the child will gradually progress in the development of language, his progress in the development of the speech will be visible. The development of the speech always takes place at certain stages or milestones which represent a framework to adult, and within this framework the development of typical child's speech is supposed to take place. It often happens that we find out that a child has not reached a certain level or even that his speech is at a lower rate than his peers' speech, which means that the child is likely to have a problem in the field of speech-language. In this case we need to seek assistance from the experts who help the child as much as possible to compensate for deficits in his speech development. It is well known that the child's speech is much easier to understand by his immediate family members, as well as educators, as they spend a lot of time with the child. So they represent a role model to the child by which the child is inspired and is learning the speech by imitating. In addition to communication with adult every child also needs a contact with his peers to interact and communicate with, particulary in the game.
In the thesis I wanted to determine the level of speech intelligibility of children aged 1 to 6 years. I was also interested in what extent parents (mother, father), grandparents, educators and assistants understand the speech of the child, and whether the survey respondents' answers matched or not.
In the empirical part of the thesis I have gained the results by using The scales of intelligibility in everyday life (ICS), Slovenian (McLeod, Harrison and McCormack, translated by Kogovšek and Ozbič, 2012), which I have divided to the teachers, their assistants, and to parents and grandparents of children in the kindergarten units Vrhnika and Barjanček. Parents and grandparents also had to fulfill a questionnaire with certain questions, which answers have served more detailed description of the sample.
The results of the research in the thesis showed us that the speech of children at different ages is understood differently by those who communicate with the child, and also that the development of speech takes place at certain levels set by the stages of preschool child's speech. Persons who spend more time with the child better understand his speech from the initial stages of speech development, rather than people who are not often in contact with the child.
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