LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: STAGES

All infants pass through the same stages in the acquisition of a first language; but they progress at different rates. So, while a child’s age in years and months is often cited (as two figures separated by a semi colon), it is not a reliable indicator of development. Many accounts record development in terms of the phonological or linguistic content of the child’s productions. The following stages are universal, the first two being prelinguistic:

Cooing (about 0;3). Gurgling moves on to vocalisation involving sounds which resemble vowels. The infant responds vocally to human speech.

Babbling (from 0;6). The infant produces consonant-vowel (CV) sequences which may resemble those of the target language. The child’s later productions become imitative: there is often a phase of echolalia from about 0;8, when the child imitates adult intonation patterns with some degree of accuracy.

One-word stage (from 1;0). Sometimes termed holophrastic speech. The first words appear at about 1;0, and by 1;6 the child may have a vocabulary of around 50 words, usually nouns. The child recognises the referential function of words, using them to name objects.

Two-word stage (1;6 onwards). Sometimes described as telegraphic speech because of the absence of most function words. The two-word combinations exhibit a set of primitive semantic relationships (constituting a child grammar) of which the earliest are usually naming (this), recurrence (more) and non-existence (no). At about the same time, the vocabulary spurt begins, with an increase of about six to ten words a day in the child’s repertoire.

 Multi-word stage (2;6 onwards). The child uses strings of three or more words, often based upon established two-word patterns. Adult syntactic patterns gradually become more prevalent.

Instead of age, a more precise way of calibrating the development of an infant is by mean length of utterance (MLU): a figure based on the average number of morphemes in the infant’s productions. This is said to be a reliable marker of development until the age of about 4;0. Using MLU, early researchers proposed six stages of development (Table L1).

Those who take a Piagetian perspective have attempted to relate progress in language to the cognitive developments of the sensorimotor period (age 0–2) and the pre-operational period (2–7). These include object permanence, the formation of categories and an understanding of causality and displacement. The argument is that the child cannot understand linguistic forms representing such notions until the notions themselves have been acquired. Vygotsky’s developmental stages also provide a loose framework for language development. Vygotsky identified a first stage when thought and language (a child’s first words) are unrelated; a second stage of egocentric speech when the child expresses its thoughts aloud; and a third when egocentric speech becomes internalised.

Yet another account of the stages of acquisition represents them in terms of the pragmatic functions which the child commands rather than surface features of syntax (see functionalism).

In any of these accounts, some caution has to be exercised in accepting productions as evidence of development. Receptive recognition of form and understanding of meaning may occur well before an item appears in production. Conversely, the production of a form might predate ‘acquisition’: it might, for example, result from mimicry without understanding.

 See also: Functionalism, Phonological development: production, Piagetian stages of development, Syntactic development, Vocabulary acquisition, Vygotskyan

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هل توقيت نشاطك اليومي يؤثر على صحة دماغك؟.. العلماء يجيبون

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