Language acquisition

Language is the medium of communication and mostly manifested in written, oral and manual forms.

Language is a cognition that truly makes us human.  Whereas other species do communicate with an innate ability to produce a limited number of meaningful vocalizations,  or even with partially learned systems,  there is no other species known to date that can express infinite ideas (sentences) with a limited set of symbols (speech sounds and words).

Language refers to a form of communication in which we learn to use complex rules to form and manipulate symbols that are to generate an endless number of meaningful sentences.  Sequence of Language Development starting at birth.  Language is practically absent, at about   4 weeks small throaty sounds are noticed and around five year’s child speaks without infantile articulation. Language Acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate.

Stages of language acquisition

There are five basic stages of language acquisition:

•       Cooing: Appears at about 6 months or so. All infants coo using all the phonemes from every language. It comprises mostly of vowel sounds.

•       Babbling: to talk or say something in a quick, confused, excited or foolish way. It Appears at around 9 months. Infants are starting to selectively use the phonemes from their native language.

•       Consonants are also introduced along with vowels and he is able to correlate words with objects or people. It starts using words with repetitive sounds like “dada”, “mama” etc.

•       One-word utterances: At around 12 months, children start using words. Starts using fairly complex words. Also can recognize correct pronunciation of familiar words. The next stage observed is two word utterance by age of 18 months.

•       Telegraphic speech: Children start making multi-word utterances that lack function words i.e. conjunctions & articles. (about 2 years old) for eg. “water now”

•       Normal speech: By about 5-6 years of age, children have almost normal speech with good command over syntax and semantics. In later stage development of vocabulary and pragmatics takes place.