STAGES OF LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

•The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a hypothetical module of the human mind posited to account for children's innate predisposition for language acquisition.- Chomsky

•Behaviorism suggests that language is an immensely complex chain of associations and that learning language is a process of selective reinforcement (Skinner 1957).

•Two important skills in describing the development of language in children are :

1.RECEPTIVE SKILL2.EXPRESSIVE SKILL

THE PRELINGUISTIC PERIOD

•Developmental aspects related to speech would include the development of gestures, making adequate eye contact, sound repartee between infant and caregiver, cooing, babbling and crying.

•Babbling a state in language acquisition during which an infant appears to be experimenting with uttering articulate sounds, but does not yet produce any recognizable words.

The child usually produces a syllable consisting of a consonant plus a vowel which often called REDUPLICATION.

REDUPLICATION- is the frequent repetition of syllabic sounds such as /adadadadada/ or /mamamamama/ in which the baby engages.

THE HOLOPHRASTIC PERIOD

•at this stage the child only produces one understandable word at a time when communicating with adults.

The TELEGRAPHIC PERIOD•By 18 months the child reaches this stage. •Child begins to use words in combinations. •the two-word stage where children would put together two successive single words

COMMON CATEGORIES OF MEANING (SEMANTIC RELATIONS) EXPRESSED IN CHILDREN'SEARLIEST SENTENCES

Semantic Relations Examples

Agent + Action Mommy come ; daddy sitAction + Object Drive car; eat grapeAction + location Go park ; Sit chair Entity + attribute Box shiny ; crayon big Agent + object Mommy sock ; baby book

COMPLEX PERIOD•the child reaches this stage between the age of two and two and a half. Grammatical morphemes in the form of prefixes or suffices are used when changing meanings or tenses. Furthermore, the child can now form sentences with a subject and a predicate.

EXAMPLES“Doggy is big”

“Where is ball?”“That is not egg”

“I want more sugar”“I catched it”

“I falling”