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/
