Stages of child language acquisition

In a nutshell

Language learning is an innate process that babies are born knowing how to do. All children learn in the same way, regardless of the language their parents speak. In this summary, the development of phonology, grammar and meaning will be explored.

The development of phonology

Below, you explore how babies develop control over sound.

AGE	FEATURES	COMMENTS
0-2 months	Crying	Crying is the first sign of a stimulus-response process in babies. Crying is also important from a physiological viewpoint. It helps the baby to manage air intake and output.
4-7 months	Cooing First laughter Changes in pitch and loudness	Children discover their vocal cords at this time.
7-9 months	Babbling Expansion of pronounceable sounds (like syllables) Repeated patterns (like reduplicated monosyllables)	There is a phonemic expansion and an increase in muscle control. Children also start to combine and repeat sounds, increasingly resembling adult language.
9-24 months	Proto-words Consonant clusters	Babies begin to take control over the sounds they make and start to 'talk' on their own because they enjoy it. You can understand isolated sounds they make and, as time goes on, babies begin to use groups of consonants, building up a more complex language.

The development of grammar

As children grow up, they begin to combine words and use syntax without knowing it.

AGE AND STAGE	FEATURES	COMMENTS
9-18 months First words classification	Classify first words Holophrase	Most of the first 50 words babies learn are nouns and they use them one at a time to convey a complete message (known as holophrase). E.g. 'juice' means 'I want to drink juice now'.
18-24 months Two-word stage	Combine two words Use of verbs	They start using very simple syntax by combining nouns and verbs to express complete meanings. E.g. 'want juice' implies that they want to drink juice, but if there is a dog next to them and they say 'dog want', it may mean that they want the dog to drink juice as well.
24-36 months Telegraphic stage	Wider repertoire of utterances Use of prepositions	The wording of children's messages is concise like a telegram. They start using nouns, verbs and prepositions to communicate their needs, but hardly ever use determiners.
From 30 months onwards Post-telegraphic stage	Confuse pronouns Recognise inflection Over-generalisation	Children start using pronouns inconsistently. They can use 'you', but confuse 'it' (for them, it is the same as 'she' or 'he'). They also start recognizing morphemes, but they do not use them properly. E.g. they know that 'ed' refers to the past, so they add it to the verb, even to irregular verbs!

The development of meaning

As children grow up, they begin to realise that words are connected to each other: some words are similar, some words are slightly different, others are completely distinct, etc. This is network building. Below are some keywords you should know related to this network of knowledge and meaning.

Vocabulary

It is important to distinguish between productive vocabulary (words a child uses) and receptive vocabulary (words a child understands). A child will always have much more receptive vocabulary than productive. To put it another way, when you learn a new language it is easier for you to understand words than to use them. The same thing happens to children when they acquire their own language.

Overextension and underextension

Overextension is when a child uses one word to refer to a wide range of concepts. E.g. as a dog has four legs, when a child sees another four-legged animal such as a cat or a horse, the child calls it a dog. That is a semantic error. Leslie Rescorla (1980) divides overextension into three kinds: categorical, analogical and predicate. The opposite of overextension is underextension. E.g. a child uses 'pear' to refer to all fruits. It is confusing for children to identify fruits because there are so many of them, so they call them all by one name. They confuse hyponyms and hypernyms.

Process of identifying meaning

Aitchison (1987) divides the process of splitting words into meaningful categories into three stages: labelling (attaching words to objects), packaging (try to sort words into categories) and network building (identifying real connections between words).

References

Aitchison, J. (1987). The language lifegame: prediction, explanation and linguistic change. Explanation and Linguistic Change. 11-32.

Rescorla, L. A. (1980). Overextension in early language development. Journal of child language, 7(2). 321-335.