STAGES OF

LANGUAGE
ACQUISITIO
N
How do children learn to speak? Deliberations continue
between linguists regarding the importance of ‘nature’ over
‘nurture’ in acquisition of language.
■ Must have poverty of stimulus to learn without "language instinct.
■ All children learn a language; have language capacity.
■ Overgeneralizations demonstrate child is analyzing language.
■ Children cannot acquire language without social
interaction/scaffolding.
■ Children learn the language of their environment; through parents
who model social interaction.
■ Memorization of chunks by rote demonstrates not all info is analyzed
fully.
 The Stages of
First Language
Acquisition
 BUBBLING
■ Within a few weeks of being born the baby begins to recognize it’s
mothers’ voice. There are two sub-stages within this period.
■ First sub-stage( Birth to 8 months). -the baby begin using it’s vocals.
■ During these months the baby hears sounds around them and tries to
reproduce them, albeit with limited success. The babies attempts at
creating and experimenting with sounds is what we call babbling.
■ When the baby has been babbling for a few months it begins to relate
the words or sounds it is making to objects or things.
■ Second sub-stage ( 8 months to 12 months) - The baby gains more and
more control over not only it’s vocal communication but physical
communication as well.
■ Eventually when the baby uses both verbal and non-verbal means to
communicate, only then does it move on to the next stage of language
acquisition.
 Holophrastic / One-word stage
■ The second stage of language acquisition.
■ This stages characterized by one word sentences.
■ Nouns make up around 50% of the infants vocabulary while verbs and
modifiers make up around 30% and questions and negatives make up
the rest.
■ This one-word stage contains single word utterances such as "play” for
“I want to play now”.
■ Infants use these sentence primarily to obtain things they want or need,
but sometimes they aren’t that obvious.
 Two-Word Stage
■ made of up primarily two word sentences.
■ These sentences contain 1 word for the predicate and 1 word for the
subject. For example “Doggie walk” for the sentence “The dog is
being walked.”
■ During this stage we see the appearance of single modifiers e.g.
“That dog”, two word questions e.g. “Mummy eat?” and the addition
of the suffix –ing onto words to describe something that is currently
happening e.g. “Baby Sleeping.”
 Telegraphic Stage
■ -The final stage of language acquisition.
■ This stage is named as it is because it is similar to what is seen in a
telegram; containing just enough information for the sentence to
make sense.
■ This stage contains many three and four word sentences.