The Stages of Language Acquisition

Children's Language Development- Spoken

 

Stage One: Babbling:

Babbling is the first stage of Children's Language Acquisition. It isn't a major stage but some theories say it's the first as it is the first stage where children attempt to talk. Babies recognise their mother's own voice after the first few weeks of being born. It's usually at 8 months that the baby begins using it's vocals to talk. Babies tend to learn by imitation and babbling stage is just like that. Within the first few months the baby hears sounds surrounding them and tries to reproduce them, albeit with limited success. The babies attempts at creating and matching the sounds which is what we call babbling. After babbling for a few months, it begins to link the words or sounds it's making to objects or actions. From 8 months-12 months the baby gains more and more control over not only it’s vocal communication but physical communication as well, like body language and gesturing.  When the baby uses both verbal and non-verbal means to communicate, only then does it move on to the next stage of language acquisition.

 

Holophrastic / One-word stage:

In this stage, children are around 12-18 months and learn to produce single words to mean phrases or sentences. An example would be "play" which could mean I want to play or "Teddy" if they want their teddy. During this stage, nouns make up around 50% of the vocabulary compared to verbs and modifiers which make up around 30% and questions and negatives which make up the rest. The reason that this stage is called the holophrastic stage, is because sometimes children's production of speech is longer and is considered as being only one unit or a whole phrase, which is called a Holophrase. An example would be "Gosleep".

Children learn the ability to distinguish between interrogative, declarative and imperative phrases, and despite their limited grammatical structuring, are able to aid their communication more effectively. For example: 'Dada?' said with a rising tone, would imply a question. 'Dada' said with a falling tone, would imply declarative statement.  'Dada!' said in an exclamation, would imply imperative statement. Children also learn words usually in a certain order. The most common are nouns first, particularly the names of objects directly involved in the baby’s life e.g. ball and doll. The second most frequent is action words often used to get attention. E.g. “bye-bye”, “up” “look”. Describing words, personal, social and function words usually come later on.

 

Two word stage:

The two word stage is around the age of 18-24 months and is made up of primarily two word sentences. These sentences contain 1 word for the predicate and 1 word for the subject. . 'Baby chair', 'Mummy eat' and 'Cat bad' are all examples of utterances at this stage and as it may be obvious, require interpretation. During this stage we see the appearance of single modifiers e.g. “That dog”, two word questions: “Mummy eat?” and the addition of the suffix onto words to describe something that is happening : “Baby Sleeping.” Context of an utterance can help the ambiguity behind such statements. For example: 'Baby chair' could mean:

·         Possession: 'this is baby's chair'.

·         Request/command: 'put baby in chair'.

·         Statement: 'baby is in the chair'.

 

The Telegraphic Stage:

This stage is between the age 2-3 and could be considered the most important. The stage is named this because it is similar to what is seen in a telegram; containing just enough information for the sentence to make sense. This stage contains three and four word sentences. Sometime during this stage the child begins to see the links between words and objects and some of the children's utterances are grammatically correct, for example: "teddy looks tired."  However others have grammatical elements missing: "This shoe all wet"- it's missing is to make it correct.

Children are more likely to keep hold of content words (nouns, verbs and adjectives, that refer to real things) and function words (that have grammatical function: pronouns and verbs) are often lost.

Overgeneralisations are also found at this stage, which is when children make errors in their allowance of variety. For example:

§  The inflection -s to mark plurality is seen to be added to irregular verbs: sheep: sheeps

§  The inflection -ed to mark past tense is seen to be added to irregular verbs: go: goed

Such examples would suggest that children try to figure out grammar by themselves,  not by hearing them from the people around them in their environment. Children would not hear 'goed' from the adults around them. 

 During this stage a child’s vocabulary expands from 50 words to up to 13,000 words. At the end of this stage the child starts to incorporate plurals, joining words and attempts to get a grip on tenses.

As a child’s grasp on language grows it may seem to us as though they just learn each part in a random order, but it's not the case. There's a definite order of speech sounds. Children first start speaking vowels, starting with the rounded mouthed sounds like “oo” and “aa”. After the vowels come the consonants, p, b, m, t, d, n, k and g. The consonants are first because they are easier to pronounce then some of the others, for example ‘s’ and ‘z’ require specific tongue place which children cannot do at that age.

As all human beings do, children will improvise something they cannot yet do. For example when children come across a sound they cannot produce they replace it with a sound they can e.g. "Wun" instead of "Run." 

Reference:

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCEQFjAAahUKEwjaw_HTn-rHAhXDltsKHbQlCNI&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thestudentroom.co.uk%2Fattachment.php%3Fattachmentid%3D25709%26d%3D1151420036&usg=AFQjCNHQ-68vokbrzro4t3msVWF0nTtsmQ&bvm=bv.102022582,d.bGg

https://sites.google.com/a/sheffield.ac.uk/all-about-linguistics/branches/language-acquisition/what-is-child-lanuage-acquistion

https://enlsac2max.wordpress.com/stages-of-language-acquisition/