Speech and language knowledge are not just given to us. We have to learn them and the key period to learn how to speak is the pre-school period. Speech abilities intensively, quantitatively and qualitatively develop between the age of two and four. Children's first way of communicating with the world is by crying. After that they form their first voices, coos and chatter. Children like to experiment to see what their vocal folds are capable of. Later they combine different voices to create their first words, followed by combining two or three words to form a sentence.
A variety of factors influence the speech learning process. Among them the most influential ones are genetics, gender, quality of family life, family’s economic state and parental educational level.
Parents and teachers in the kindergarten are the ones who can encourage children’s speech development the most. In this thesis I was researching the time dedicated to encouraging speech by parents during children’s free play, everyday conversations or with the help of speech exercises.
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