Developmental Stages of Language Acquisition in Children
1. Learning in the womb:
Children starts to develop language when they’re in their mother’s womb, even before they’re born. During this period of time, a child prefers the voice of the mother over all other female voices. However, this isn’t the case with the father. They only start to prefer the voice of their father over other males after two weeks, showing that preference is based on familiarity. |
2.Soundless Communication (0-3 months):
During this stage, children learn to use non-verbal forms of communication, such as body language and eye contact. - ‘Eye gaze norm’ Babies being to understand the acceptable length of time between re-establishing eye contact and the acceptable intensity of eye contact. - 'Turn –taking norm’ Babies starts to pick up on the accepted conventions for a speaker to establish their ‘turn’ in conversation. - Use body Language Children make use of body language to communicate from a very young age. Examples of the body language they use could be looking in the direction of something they want, pointing or pulling on a parent’s sleeve. |
4.Babbling (6-12 months)
- Canonical (~ 7 months) This type of babbling is when babies start to produce some consonants, repeating the same syllables over and over. They also learn to control the movement of their jaw up and down. - Variegated (~10 months) Babies learn make babbling sounds consisting of a mix of syllables. These sounds are similar to those produced in the language the child is acquiring. Although at the babbling stage, babies have learnt to produce sounds that mimic those of language, their vocal use is still devoid of meaning. The child might produce words that exist in the language, but their often do this without recognizing of what they are referring to. |
6. Telegraphic/ Two- word stage (1.5- 2.5 years) Children being to produce 2 word utterance during this stage, which are highly abbreviated and lack grammatical information. As well, the child’s vocabulary would have reached to about 50 words and their lexical acquisition would have improved dramatically. 7. Multi-word (2.5 yrs +) At this stage, the length of utterances pronounced by a child begins to increase and more grammatical information is evident in the child’s speech. |