How We Learn to Speak: The Stages of Language Acquisition

 

First language acquisition refers to how infants and young children acquire their native language naturally, without formal teaching. It’s a universal process that happens in predictable stages, although the exact ages may vary slightly by child. Studies of linguistic development have revealed a series of crucial stages in children as they master their native languages. Though the correlation of age with the given stage can vary remarkably from child to child, the particular sequences of stages seem to be the same for all children in first language acquisition.

Stern, Nice, and Brown have classified five stages in the linguistic development of children. The stages are:

1. The period of pre-linguistic development (0- 12 months)

2. The period of single-word utterances (12- 18 months);  Holophrastic stage

3. The period of two-word utterances (18–24 months)

4. The period of three-word utterances (24- 30 months) Telegraphic stage

5. The period of the advanced stage (30+ months)

1.The period of pre-linguistic development:

The pre-linguistic stage is divided into five classes. These are crying, cooing (six to eight weeks), babbling (4 to 6 months), lallation, and echolalia. The newborn baby proclaims the importance of sound in his life by his birth cry. The cries of infants are differentiated in three ways. Wolff (1969) was able to identify three types of cry during the first two weeks of life. These are - hunger cry, pain cry, and mad cry. All three of these cries have a pitch pattern that at first rises and then falls towards the end. From the third week onwards, Wolff identified a 'fake cry'; which means that the child has no problem but simply wants attention. Certain sounds which are more obviously "segmental' occur during this period, as a byproduct of crying. Thus, glottal stops, glottal affricates, and glottal fricatives occur with some of the types of crying. Similarly, labial sounds may arise from opening and closing the mouth during crying.

When a child is three months old, it begins to make cooing or vowel like sounds like ‘oooh’, aaah, etc. ‘Cooing' refers to a stage when back vowels with lip rounding are frequent (Stark1980). 'Lalling' refers to a period when the L sounds are predominant. The cooing baby begins to vocalize responsively, and the beginnings of turn-taking sequences between mother and baby can be identified at this stage. Trevarthen has described this elementary conversation as pre-speech. At some point in the fourth or fifth month of life, two events occur about the same time. Firstly, a rapid advance in the control of the articulatory apparatus occurs (Cruttenden, 1970), and thus plosives and nasals at the dental, alveolar, palatal, and velar places of articulation may occur, as well as a great variety of vowel-like sounds. The second important event around the third month is the discovery of sounds as fun. These two events characterize the beginning of the babbling period. All children go through a babbling stage, regardless of language and culture, and make very similar kinds of sounds at this time suggests that humans are biologically predisposed to go through this phase. At this stage, infants repetitively alternate some of the simple, voiced consonants with more or less flat vowels as in “mama” or “gaga” or “papa". The result is the rise of clear syllable structure. Babbling typically lasts for six to eight months but begins to decrease after children start producing their identifiable words. Skinner (1938) claims that the course of babbling is controlled by ‘operant conditioning’.

During the seventh month, the pitch, or intonation contours of infants' utterances begin to resemble the adult intonation contours of sentences. It is this intonation pattern that the infant learns first to recognize and then to imitate. At this stage, infants imitate sounds and try to produce that sound repeatedly - this is called Lallation. A sound is created by the movement of its vocal apparatus, and the child tries to imitate it as it strikes its ear, and this stimulates produce the sound again and again. Around the eighth month, infants begin to hear and echo and repeat sounds of others, which is called echolalia. This stage is more developed than lallation.

2. Holophrastic Stage

The one-word stage of children is known as a holophrastic stage. At this stage, the child begins using the predominant words of their native language. During the period, plosives and nasals establish their predominance. Thus [b][d][g][m][n] become the predominating consonants. The child's repertoire of consonants has drifted so that it is available for the take-off into language. It has been suggested that babies' babbling varies according to the language which their parents speak, i.e., that babbling drift is specifically in the direction of the mother tongue.

From nine months onward, researchers identified segments of vocalization that seem to correspond to words. For example:

bye bye-  /bab/

hi-  /ha/

nose - /o/

light- /al/

The adults understand the child from these utterances by gesture and surroundings.

A child's words are at this time made of consonants [b][d][g][m][n] and vowels [a] and possibly [i][u]. During this stage, it has learnt that words are made up of a limited number of phonological units combined in different ways. It has learnt the phonemic principles. Also, by this time, interpersonal functions were marked by special vocabulary items or by intonation. There is a strong indication that by this stage, children can respond to entire patterns of adult speech. The child learns to make contrasts among the consonants.

At this stage the child simplifies adult language. For example:

Kick –            ki             - they omit the final consonant

Small -          ma          - reduce consonant cluster

Kitchen-        kiki         - repeat syllables, omit unstressed syllables.

This is the time when a child notices the change ( appeared, disappeared, open, close) around him. At this stage, instead of saying "doggy," they say "goggy" or "doddy" which indicates that they are repeating the same vowel or consonant sound to utter a word.

Words are usually produced in isolation. Children's first words are similar all over the world. These words are phonetically like animal cries. The child's vocabulary is small, and as one word is gained, another may be lost. The children needed approximately two weeks to acquire 10 words in comprehension, but four weeks in production. According to some child-language researchers, the words in the holophrastic stage serve the major functions; they are either linked with a child's own action or desire for action, or are used to convey emotion, or serve a naming function.

A composite of some of the most frequent words to occur across

selected semantic categories, taken from Nelson (1973)

Specific nominals: 'daddy', 'mommy'

General nominals: 'baby', 'cookie', 'hat', 'bottle', 'ball' etc

Action words: 'up', 'sit', 'go' etc

Modifiers: 'hot', 'allgone', 'more', 'here' etc

Personal-social words: 'hi', 'bye (bye)', 'no' yes (yeah)' etc

Children's use of words sometimes shows an overextension or underextension of reference. For example, a certain child might use the word doggie to refer not just to dogs but to all common animals in the environment. In contrast, a child might use this word only for certain specific dogs.

From the perspective of adult grammar, the kind of words that occur at this stage include simple nouns and verbs; there are as yet very few so-called function words ( prepositions, articles, auxiliary verbs, interrogative words) in the child's language.

At this stage, children can specify objects as movers, movables, places, recipients and instruments. At the one-word stage, movers seem to correspond to the Agentive case, movables to the objective case, recipients to the Experiencer case, places to the Locative case, and instruments to the Instrumental case. However, the child's notion of mover is not yet the exact equivalent of the adult's Agentive case: mover applies to a smaller group than the agentive and at the same time may include things like cars or trains that are not agentive(Schlesinger, 1974; Bowerman, 1974a; Braine, 1976).

De Laguna argued that it was important not just to consider the word child expressed but also the gestures with which he accompanied the utterance and other aspects of the context of utterance. Ingram (1972) and Antinucci and Parisi (1975) make an explicit claim that the child expresses only part of the sentence in its utterance. For example:

1. Recurrence - more -pointing to meat

2. Negation - no - struggling to escape being held

3. Possession - John - pointing to John's hat

4. Action- eat - (wanting to eat some berries) [Greenfield and Smith 1976]

Towards the end of the first year, a child may be using a characteristic pitch pattern with each of his early words and expressions. During the one-word stage, he may begin to use the difference between a falling and a rising pitch pattern systematically. He can use intonation to express a request or demand, and sometimes they produce voiced sounds like fan, ban, than other sounds. In this way, the child finished his holophrastic stage.

3. Telegraphic Speech (24–30 months)

During the second year of life, the utterances of children gradually become longer, and the one-word stage gives way to the two-word stage.

Around 18 months, language changes in two ways. Vocabulary growth increases; the child begins to learn words at a rate of one every two waking hours, and will keep learning at that rate or faster through adolescence (Clark, 1993; Pinker, 1994). The primitive syntax emerges, with two-word strings like the following:

All dry.

More hot.

I sit.

Airplane allgone.

No pee.

Papa come.

The early speech of children is frequently considered as 'telegraphic" as it lacks inflections and function words.

Children's two-word combinations are very similar across cultures. Everywhere, children announce when objects appear, disappear, and move about, point out their properties and owners, comment on people doing things and seeing things, reject and request objects and activities, and ask about who, what, and where. These sequences already reflect the language being acquired: in 95% of them, the words are properly ordered (Braine, 1976; Brown, 1973; Pinker, 1984; Ingram, 1989).

4.Syntax development and semantic relations

: During this stage, children begin to express certain relations. They use word order to indicate certain semantic relations. Bowerman (1973) identified eight relations that occurred frequently in the two-word utterances. The

experiment was on a two-year-old girl called Kendall. These were:

Verb and Agentive: Kendall swim.	Verb and Objective: shoe off
Verb and Experiencer: see Kendall	Agentive and Objective: Kendall book.
Verb and Locative: play bed	Verb and Goal: writing book

 

Bowerman did not confine himself to the relations proposed by Fillmore (agentive, instrumental, experiencer, goal, locative and objective). The first thing to notice is that the cases are not alwavs expressed with consistent word order. Kendall sometimes placed the Objective case first and sometimes second. But the Agentive case always went in first position. The Locative case always followed when it is combined with a verb.

The main constituents of sentences are all present during the first year of syntax: verb phrases, noun phrases, noun phrases and adverbial phrases. The earliest structural types are subject + intransitive verb (Teddy sleep, Jenny crying); subject + (be) adjective, the copula being omitted at first, (e.g. Mummy busy, Daddy tired). This early type of child utterance has been called telegraphic (Brown and Bellugi, 1964) because it excludes function words and morphological endings; this involves the omission of all those words which are typically unaccented in the adult language. A close look at the two-word sentences of any one child will show regular formal patterns. Items and classes of words defined semantically will regularly co-occur to produce certain meanings. Animate noun plus inanimate noun produces three possible meanings: possession, location and agent-goal. Many children operate from the very beginning with a fixed word order for at least some types of sentences. Some formal patterns correlating with semantic types are therefore present in two-word utterances.

In Fillmore's view there are some case relations of the child's two-word utterances , such as-

(Agent- Kimmy sit / Instrument- Cat spoon /

xperiencer- Kimmy hurt / Locative -Daddy home.)

Bloom, Lightbown, Hood (1975) show that children do not always combine words always in a fixed order. It varies from child to child. Brown proposed that during this period there were three basic categories of reference available to the child: nomination( this necklace), recurrence ( more cookies), and non-existence ( sun-gone).

The short sentences of children seem to consist of two parts of speech joined together by some simple rule. This apparent fact was first discovered by Braine (1963) and he named the two classes pivot and open. Pivot words are a very small class compared to open words, and their number grows very slowly. And pivot words unlike open words, are rarely used on their own as single word utterances. The majority of early two word utterances seemed to have the following structure:

Pivot + Open (see boy, allgone shoe) or Open + Pivot (do it, close it)

Another important grammatical characteristic of the child's utterances is the lack of inflections and function words such as articles, prepositions, auxiliaries, and modals. Mainly it is nouns, verbs, and adjectives that are predominant in the utterances. This is

not surprising when one considers that it is these classes of words that carry the most information and would be the first that children would learn to understand. It is because two-word utterances are mainly formed of content words, lacking function words and inflections. This stage of development in a child's speech is often referred to as the telegraphic stage. Being short in length and with content words predominating, such utterances have the essential characteristics of a telegram message.

Stress: Children often use heavier stress on one word than the other in two-word utterances. Wieman's (1974, 1976) experiment on five children shows that children at two-word stress use focal stress or heavier stress systematically to indicate new information. Such as:

BLUE man, NICE ball, ORANGE ball etc.

Intonation: At the stage of two-word utterances, intonation may be the most consistent criterion for dividing child speech into sentences. Intonation is intimately connected with accent. Accent may differentiate various semantic types of sentences at the two-word stage, e.g. `Daddy car ('That's daddy's car'); Daddy `car ('Daddy's in the car'). At this stage, accentual patterns correlate regularly with the various semantic types of two-word sentences.

The Advanced Stage

Between the late two's and mid-three's, children's language blooms into fluent grammatical conversation so rapidly that it overwhelms the researchers who study it, and no one has worked out the exact sequence. Sentence length increases steadily, and because grammar is a combinatorial system, the number of syntactic types increases exponentially, doubling every month, reaching the thousands before the third birthday (Ingram, 1989, p. 235; Brown, 1973; Limber, 1973; Pinker, 1984).

At the beginning of the three-word stage, children produce sentences like a telegram. For example:

Mummy give book

Kimmy drink milk

Both the sentences have Subject + Verb + Object like adult sentences.

Over this period Brown traced the development of fourteen grammatical morphemes in the speech of the three children he was studying. These were present progressive ( I walking, I playing), the prepositions (in and on), plural inflections(-s,-es),past inflections or irregular verbs, possessive inflections, uncontractible copula such as is, am and are, the articles, past inflections on regular verbs, regular third person forms( does, has), uncontractible auxiliary forms, the contractible copula and contractible auxiliary.

In English, the past tense of most verbs is formed by the addition of the suffix written,-ed(jump). There is also a group of strong irregular verbs where the addition of the past tense morpheme may involve changes in the stem as well as in the suffix (bring - brought). Children add the regular past tense suffix to the verb they use. They therefore produce appropriate past tense forms for all regular or weak verbs (jump- jumped, pick- picked), but make mistakes on the irregular verbs. Goed, byed, and breaked, for example, replace went, bought and broke. These overgeneralisations suggest that children have formed the hypothesis from regular verbs and it also indicates their creativity and understanding of underlying rule. This overgeneralisation is limited to past tense, plural forms in English ( mouses) and in degrees of comparison( gooder, badest), it is naturally more widespread in those languages with a large number of morphological inflections.

The knowledge of parts of speech begins to emerge at this time. They are beginning to use noun and verb. Children use attributives at this time: their favourite adjectives are : big, little, pretty, poor etc. Complex sentences like statements and declaratives are found too at this time.

In the early multiword stage, negative words occur at the beginning of expressions, for example, no eat, allgone milk. After this stage, negative word begins to appear internally in expression (mommy no play) and we also find negative auxiliaries like can't and don't. Yes/ no question is marked by rising and falling tone, and wh-questions are quite limited at this stage (Where doggie?, What dat?). With the development of auxiliary verbs, inversion of subject and auxiliary begins to appear in children's yes/no questions (Can't you get it?, Will you help me?). However, even at this stage, the inversion of word order has not yet begun to occur in wh- wh-questions as in ( What she did?, What he can do?). The inversion of auxiliaries in wh-questions (What did she do?, What can he do? ) develops at a stage later than the stage where inversion of auxiliaries occurs in yes/no questions.

At this stage they still seem to rely on focal stress to indicate which is new and make little attempt to manipulate syntactic structure in presenting thematic information.(Hornby and Hass,1970).

5.The advanced stage of a child

During the grammar explosion, children's sentences are getting not only longer but more complex, because the children can embed one constituent inside another. Whereas before they might have said Give doggie paper (a three-branch Verb Phrase) and Big doggie (a two-branch Noun Phrase), they now say Give big doggie paper, with the two-branch NP embedded inside the three-branch VP. They can now use imperative, optative, exclamatory and optative sentences.

The earlier sentences resembled telegrams, missing unstressed function words such as of, the, on, and does, as well as inflections like -ed, -ing, and -s. By the 3's, children are using these function words more often than they are omitting them, many in more than 90% of the sentences that require them.

A full range of sentence types emerge -- questions with words like whom, what and where, relative clauses, comparatives, negations, complements, conjunctions, and constructions appear to display the most, perhaps even all, of the grammatical machinery needed to account for adult grammar.

Children do not seem to favour any particular kind of language. They swiftly acquire free word order, SOV and VSO orders, rich systems of case and agreement, strings of agglutinative suffixes, ergative case marking, and whatever else their language throws at them, with no lag relative to their English-speaking counterparts. Even grammatical gender, which many adults learning a second language find problematic, presents no problem: children acquiring language like French, German, and Hebrew acquire gender marking quickly, make few errors, and never use the association with maleness and femaleness as a false criterion (Levy, 1983). It is safe to say that, except for constructions that are rare or predominantly used in written language, or mentally taxing even to an adult (like the horse that the elephant tickled kissed the pig), all parts of all Languages are acquired before the child turns four (Slobin,1985/1992).

 Summary Table

Stage	Age Range	Features	ELT Implication
Pre-linguistic	0–12 months	Cooing, babbling, gestures	Listening first; input-rich lessons
Holophrastic (One-Word)	12–18 months	Single words, over/underextension	Start with key vocab and visuals
Two-Word	18–24 months	Mini sentences, basic word order	Focus on meaning, not grammar, yet
Telegraphic	24–30 months	Longer phrases, missing small words	Encourage communication over accuracy
Early multi-Word	30+ months	Grammar develops, vocabulary explodes	Introduce structured grammar
Later Multi-Word	3–7 years	Errors, but complex structures emerge	Support with correction and stories
Mature Language Use	7+ years	Adult-like complexity, abstract ideas	Long-term exposure for mastery