Lesson 4 - Stages of 1st Language Development

Presentation of Theoretical Construct

 

Lecture Information:

B. Children Acquire Language in Stages

The prelinguistic stage: birth to 6 months
Crying, whimpering, cooing are not considered language because they are involuntary responses to stimuli.  Linguists consider human language to be creative – as free from internal or external stimuli.  But the child is born with a kind of prewiring for language.  This is revealed by tests in which infants alter their sucking patterns when presented with a phonetic distinction in sounds.  The alteration in sucking is said to show an awareness of the change in sound.  But they do not seem to attach meaning to the changes in sounds; they only register that they notice them.  This awareness is exhibited as early as one month old.  Children can differentiate between sounds that are allophones in a language that adult speakers of that language have learned to ignore, such as [p] and [p^h].

The Babbling Stage: Age 6 months to 1 year
Children begin to respond only to sounds that are the language distinctions of their parents’ (caretakers) language and ignore/lose the ability to distinguish between others.  They begin to make babbling sounds of their own.  Even deaf children babble, but there is disagreement whether their babbling is the same as the babbling of hearing children.  A study published in 1991 suggests that it is different and that the hand gestures of deaf children occur in the repetitive patterns that the babbling of hearing children do.

First Words: Age 1 year and on
Babbling may overlap into this stage.  Holophrastic one word = one sentence pattern seems to exist, usually with a CV syllable [no] [da] (dog) [ma] (mom) [dæ] (dad), etc.  Children can perceive more sound segments than they can produce.

1. developmental order of sounds articulated

2. full range of vowels before full range of consonants

3. stops before other consonants

4. basic manner in from front to back: labials first, then alveolars,

5. then velars, then alveopalatals.  Interdentals come last

6. new contrasts show up in initial position first

7. words are primarily noun-like with verbs second and adjectives third

8. words also include displeasure/rejection words, and social interaction

9. words (bye-bye, night-night)

Two-word Stage: Age 1½ or 2 and on
Developmental order of sounds continues to add sounds to child’s repertoire.  There are 11 consonant sounds that are typically included.  Vocabulary of 50 or more words at beginning of this stage.  Clear syntactic and semantic relations begin to appear, but not syntactic or morphological markers.  There are no inflectional affixes, pronouns are rare. An utterance can carry more than one meaning because of these lacks “mommy sock” can mean “mommy is putting my sock on my foot” or “there is mommy’s sock.”  Words are associated with meaning in several ways: a) Whole Object: word refers to whole object, not to any of its parts, so “sheep” will not be taken to mean white or woolly or leg b) Type: word refers to the type of thing, not a particular thing.  A child may take “sheep” to mean any animal, not just that particular kind of animal. c) Basic level assumption: a word refers to types of objects that are alike in basic ways.  “sheep” might be taken to mean any animal, but probably won’t be taken to mean “rose” or “flower” (Thus, Disney’s Bambi is a bad example of first language acquisition!)  Contextual clues are used to attach meaning.  Children may overextend a word’s meaning, such as “sheep” means animal.  Overextensions may not be a misunderstanding, but a compensatory technique to overcome vocabulary limitations.  They plug in a hole until the child can learn the proper word.  Underextension may also occur.  Kitty might mean the family cat, but not other cats.  This may be related to the prototype concept of word meaning, especially if the family pet is a poorer example of the prototype.

Telegraphic Stage: Age 2.5 or so
Children begin stringing more than two words together, perhaps three or four or five at a time.  Function words and grammatical morphemes are typically absent, but utterances exhibit phrase structure.  Articulation of sounds continues to develop in order.  20 consonants are articulated, all vowels are articulated by age 3 or so.  All vocabulary development processes continue.

Beyond Telegraphic utterances: age 3 and up
Vocabulary development continues including strategies of overextension.  A similar pattern of overgeneralization is used for morpheme development: -ed means past shows up in "goed" or "putted."  Derivational affixes and compounding show up early: ages 3 or 4.  Inversion in questions comes in later.

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