Stages of First Language AcquisitionWhat are the stages of first language acquisition?

Language is a very important part of life. Communication between people not only enables us to understand one-another, but aids in developing relationships, suggestions and plans. I'm sure you can all agree that language is a crucial part of everyday life. But how did we learn to speak?

The process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate.

This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary.

Connected with Noam Chomsky. Children are born with an innate capacity for learning human language. 

Children learn by imitating and repeating what they hear. 

A child first becomes aware of a concept, such as relative size, and only afterward do they acquire the words and patterns to convey that concept. 

Pre-speech:

• Infants learn to pay attention to speech, intonation and the rhythm of speech long before they begin to speak.

Cooing Stage 0-1 month (sleep, eat, cry) 1-4 months

Intonational patterns0-1 month (sleep, eat, cry) 1-4 months

Intonational patterns

Babbling stage: Begins at several months of age.  Many native speech sounds may be absent.  Very

few consonant clusters and repeated syllables are common.

5-12 months Sounds – enviorementInternal behaviour – not a response

6-9 months different – select – sounds - enviorement

There are three main stages of grammatical development.

Holophrastic Stage (12-18 months) -The Holophrastic stage consists of children learning and producing single word utterances that function as phrases or sentences. For example:

'Gone' could mean 'it's all gone''Teddy' could mean 'that's my teddy''More' could mean 'I want more'

Sometimes children's productions are longer and are considered as being one unit or a whole phrase (this is called a Holophrase). For example: All gone' and 'Go sleep'

Intonation plays a key role during this stage. Children learn the ability to distinguish between interrogative, declarative and imperative phrases, and despite their limited grammatical structuring, are able to aid their communication more effectively.

For example:'Dada?' said with a rising intonation, would imply a question

'Dada' said with a falling intonation, would imply declarative statement

'Dada!' said in exclamation, would imply imperative statement

Two-word Stage (18-24 months) – The Two-word stage comprises a child using (quite obviously, as stated in the title) two words to form a sentence. 'Baby chair', 'Mummy eat' and 'Cat bad' are all examples of utterances at this stage and as it may be obvious, require interpretation. Context of an utterance can aid the ambiguity behind such statements. For example:'Baby chair' could mean...Possession: 'this is baby's chair'Request/command: 'put baby in chair'Statement: 'baby is in the chair'

Telegraphic Stage (2-3 years) – The Telegraphic stage, is when children have acquired and start to use multiple-word utterances. At this stage, some of the children's utterances are grammatically correct...

'Amy likes tea' - (Subject + Verb + Object)'teddy looks tired' - (Subject + Verb + Adjective)

'Mummy sleeps upstairs' - (Subject + Verb + Adverbial)

Whilst others have grammatical elements missing...'This shoe all wet' - (the stative verb carrying meaning is missing: is)