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Theories of The Early Stages of Language
Theories of The Early Stages of Language
acquisition
What is language?
Language is the primary method of human communication, but there are also other ways to communicate without
the use of language. When asked to define language we tend to think of a verbal and written system in which
certain sounds and symbols come together in a specific way to convey meaning. Language in its most complex
form is unique to humans, although some animals have been found to have basic communication patterns.
Languages often have verbal and written components, but how we classify something like American Sign
Language? Animals manage to communicate — do they have language? How did language evolve? How do we
learn enough language ourselves to begin to answer this question?
What do we know?
As is often the case in psychology and sociology, it’s hard to get what we normally think of as data about language
acquisition. It’s not a chemical we can test for or a distance we can measure (imagine asking a 2 year old how many
words they know — not a particularly useful or productive task, right? ). However, there are some facts that are
generally agreed upon by the scientific community. The first couple years of life are the critical period for language
learning, which becomes a much harder task as people age. Children usually say their first words around 10-18
months of age, and graduate to phrases sometime before they are two years old. In fact, studies have shown that
18 month olds can tell the difference between correctly formed verb pairs (is jumping) and incorrect ones (will
jumping). Somewhere between four and seven years old children begin to be able to tell stories that more or less
make sense.
We also know that learning a language is not like walking up the steady increase of a ramp, but more like walking
the hills and valleys of a country road. Usually when we learn a new skill, the more we practice the better we get.
However, this isn’t always true in the early stages of language development. When children are first learning to
talk, the verbs they use are usually the most common such as go, eat, talk, give, run, etc. These are often irregular
in the past tense. Although at first they use the past tense properly (“I ran”, “he went”, etc), kids typically regress
for a while. They often over-follow rules, saying phrases like “I runned” instead of “I ran”. As their vocabularies
expand rapidly (known as vocabulary burst), some researchers believe children notice patterns in language, and
that leads to over-correction as described in the example above. Eventually, children begin to understand where
the rules apply and where they don’t, and then properly form the past tense once more. This is known as a U
shaped learning curve, because the language mastery started high, dropped for a period of time, and then
improved again. Thus, there appears to be a mimicking (copying) phase first and then a time of broad
generalizations before children settle into language.