First language acquisition: The acquisition schedule

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 All normal children develop language at roughly the same schedule. This is what is called the acquisition schedule. While there are children that develop slower or faster than others, there is a discernible and predictable pattern of speech development. Also, there is no “skipping” from one stage to another stage (for example, a child cannot skip from the cooing stage to the one-word stage without going through the babbling stage).

Caregiver speech

“Caregiver” includes parents, older siblings, and other care providers, including nannies. It is also called motherese or child-directed speech.

The characteristics of caregiver speech include:

1) the frequent use of questions: Oh goody, now Daddy push choo-choo?

2) often use of exaggerated intonation;

3) extra loudness;

4) slower tempo with longer pauses.

5) simplified words: tummy, nana

6) repeated sounds and syllables: choo-choo, poo-poo, pee-pee, wawa

Even if babies are in a stage where they can only produce rudimentary sounds, caregivers who “talk” with them treat these sounds as “replies” in conversation.

Cooing stage

The earliest use of speech-like sounds is called cooing.

During the first few months, the child can produce vowel-like sounds, like [i] and [u].

By four months, the child can now move the tongue to the back of the palate to produce sounds like [k] and [g].

By five months, the child can now hear the difference between [i] and [a] and [ba] and [ga].

Babbling stage

Between six to eight months, the baby can already sit up and produce different combinations of vowels and consonants and combinations such as ba-ba-ba-ba and ga-ga-ga-ga.

In the later babbling stage, there is recognizable intonation and the ability to produce combinations such as ba-ba-da-da. Children can now say mama and dada.

By the time children can pull themselves up and stand, their vocalizations can now express emotions. They can also produce more complex combinations such as ma-da-ga-ba. Children at this stage also attempt to imitate the speech of their caregivers.

One-word stage

At twelve to eighteen months, children can produce one-word “sentences”. This is also called the holophrastic stage. Examples include milk, cookie, cup, and spoon. By saying “milk”, a child could mean Mama, please give me some milk.

Two-word stage

At around eighteen to twenty months, children can have a vocabulary of about fifty words.

By the time he or she is two years old, the child can now say baby chair (‘This is my chair’ or ‘Please put me in the chair’ or ‘I am in the chair’, depending on the circumstances), mommy eat and cat bad. Children at this stage can have a spoken vocabulary of 200 words and understand about five times more than that.

Telegraphic speech

By two to two-and-a-half years old, a child can now form multiple word sentences, which are strings of lexical morphemes (i.e., ‘meaning-carrying’ words like nouns and verbs) like this shoe all wet, cat drink milk, daddy go bye-bye. Some grammatical function morphemes like prepositions also appear (in, on).

By three years old, the vocabulary has grown to hundreds of words and their pronunciation approaches those of adults.

R E F E R E N C E

Yule, G. (2006). The study of language (3rd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press. pp.  149-153.