Child Language Development
Child language development is one of the important parts of linguistics. Language plays a vital role to communicate with each other, from one country to another country. Every language has its individual characteristics and objectives. Now the question is how a language is developed in children?
A child acquires a language or mother tongue through different stages. After finishing all the stages the child is capable of acquiring his or her mother tongue. Let us see the stages of child language development. We mainly analyze the four stages of child language acquisition. The four stages of child language development demonstrated in the table below:
4 Stages of Child Language Development
The 4 significant stages of child language development are given below:
The pre-linguistic stage is the core of child language acquisition. This stage begins from a child’s birth to his to her 7 months. During childbirth, the baby vocal tract is here and there more like that of a chimp than that of a grown-up human. Specifically, the tip of the velum reaches or covers with the tip of the epiglottis. As the newborn child develops, the tract bit by bit reshapes itself in the grown-up example.
At the very first or two months of life, newborn child articulates of distress with crying. There are some non-reflexive, non-trouble sounds delivered with a brought down velum and a shut or almost shut mouth, giving the impression of a syllabic nasal or a nasalized vowel.
At the age of 2 to 4 months, the newborn child starts expressing alleviation sounds. The soonest alleviation sounds possibly snorts or moans, with the later forms being vowel-like ‘coos’. A child is able to laugh around three or four-month later from his or her birth.
At the age of 4 to 7 months, newborn children normally take part in ‘vocal play’. In this time they are able to produce different types of sounds such as friction noises, nasal murmurs etc.
Babbling stage starts at the age of six months of a baby. At this stage, a child is able to produce sounds by using his or her speech organs. Not only that those children begin to make extended sounds by oral articulations into syllable-like arrangements, opening and shutting their jaws, lips, and tongue.
At this stage children often produce fricatives, affricates, and fluids rarely. Vowels will, in general, below and open, in any event at the outset. Sometimes they produce [bababa] or [nanana] etc.
In the Babbling stage children used to produce random sounds by their speech organ. Vocal play and Babbling both produced by them when they interact with their parents or relative. In the stage, a child randomly produces a variety of sounds. Sometimes these sounds partly matching his or her mother tongue.
The two-word stage begins when a child becomes one year or one and a half-year-old. In this stage children used to pronounce from one word to two words. At the same time, children start developing their sound production capability.
In the two-word stage children naturally, follow some grammatical rules in their sentence subconsciously. We can find some inflexions at the end of the two-word stage of a child. He or she can able to describe an event by the grammatical functions. This is how a child finishes his or her two-word stage by producing a lot of sounds and combine them into sentences.
At the age of 24 months to 30 months seem to be the telegraphic stage of a child. In this period, children start producing expressions with more than two elements. The expressions of children are longer than two-words and meaningful characteristics. The little capacity words, for example, too, the a, can, is, and so on are missing; just the words that convey the primary message, that is, the substance words are utilized. The expressions like feline stand up the table, what that, and no stay here, etc do not have the capacity words. These expressions are called the telegraphic stage.
The telegraphic stage incorporates just morphemes and words that convey essential semantic substance.
To sum up, we may say, this is how a child develops his or her language. These all 4 stages of child language development are enabled children’s capability of improving his or her mother tongue.
- Dulay, H.C., & Burt, M. K. (1972). Goofing: An indication of children’s second language strategies. Language learning 22, 235-252.
- Dulay, H.C., & Burt, M. K. (1974). Natural sequences in child second language acquisition. Language Learning 24, 37-53.