Everyone is aware that children undergo rapid language acquisition during the first 2 to 3 years of their life but how do infants go from being mute to forming long sentences? What are the different stages involved in this drastic transition?
1. Birth - 4 months
- This stage involves babies beginning to read the lips of their parents/relatives. They start to match these mouth movements to the sounds that they hear. Most commonly these are ‘aah’, ‘eeh, ‘ayy’, ‘ohh’, ‘ooh.’
- Receptive Language: babies begin to understand what is being said to them and what is being said about them.
2. 4 months
- Productive language: babies begin to say words. However, because this process takes time, at 4 months, it is more common for babbling to occur.
- Babbling: this is when infants make sounds spontaneously, these primarily do not have any correlation to the household language but instead it involves sounds from a variety of languages. For deaf babies, this ‘babble’ takes the form of random hand gestures, having watched their parents sign.
3. 10 months
- Without the exposure to other languages, children lose the ability to distinguish and create sounds that are not part of their household language; this is when specialization occurs.
4. 1 yr
- One-word stage: child speaks mostly in single words, these now carry meaning.
5. 18 months
- Language acquisition increases in speed; children transition from learning 1 word a week to 1 word a day
6. 2 yrs
- Two-word stage: children speak mostly in two-word statements which mimic telegraphic speech (go-car, want-juice.) These follow the rules of their language’s syntax. For example, English-speaking children will place adjectives before the noun whereas Spanish-speaking children will place them after the noun.
7. 3yrs
- Children begin to use longer, more complex sentences.
Now the next question is how does this actually happen?
It seems that no one really is 100% sure and therefore, there are many theories behind infants’ language acquisition. B.F. Skinner, an American psychologist and behaviorist, believes that language is learnt through constant reinforcement and repetition. In contrast, Noam Chomsky, an American linguist posits that humans are born with an innate ability to acquire language and grammar due to their genes.
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