Stages of L1 language acquisition

How the mother tongue develops

Prenatal (especially last trimester)

• recognition of mother’s voice

• recognition of prose passage before birth

• recognition of native language after birth

• recognition of difference between male/female voices

Crying (0-4 months)

• babies show preference for mother’s voice at 3 weeks

• during the first two months of life, infant vocalizations are mainly expressions of discomfort (crying and fussing)

• sounds produced as a by-product of reflexive or vegetative actions such as coughing, sucking, swallowing and burping

Cooing (4-6 months)

• may be referred to as gurgling

• producing vowel sounds such as "oooh" and "aah"

Babbling (6-8 months)

• an infant appears to be experimenting with uttering sounds of language, but not yet producing any recognizable words

• consists of repeated syllables, such as /ba/, /da/, /ga/

• babies associate highly frequent words with familiar objects by 6 months

• 8-10 month olds can tell the difference between passive and active sentences and transitive and intransitive verbs

• babies prefer own language prosody at 6 months

Non-reduplicated babbling (9-12 months)

• consists of a mix of syllables, e.g. 'ka-da-bu-ba-mi-doy-doy-doy.'

• the consonants that babbling infants produce tend to be any of the following : /p, b, t, m, d, n, k, ɡ, s, h, w, j/

• the following consonants tend to be infrequently produced during phonological development : /f, v, θ, ð, ʃ, tʃ, dʒ, l, r, ŋ/

• the complex nature of sounds that developing children produce make them difficult to categorize, but the above rules tend to hold true regardless of the language to which children are exposed

• infants exhibit preference for own language phonology, stress pattern at 9 months

• at 6–12 months of age, babies typically babble and enjoy vocal play as they experiment with a range of sounds they are exposed to

• at about 11 months infants put names to the objects and people around them

Holophrastic stage (12-18 months)

• at 12–18 months, toddlers begin to use sound in a meaningful way

• they utter one-syllable words, make sounds imitating cars and planes, and say things like, "uh oh."

• toddlers also understand the meaning of some words they cannot yet say

• they may also use one word to represent a whole sentence. For example, "Juice" may mean, "Mother, I would like some juice," "You are drinking juice," or "Oh look, there is juice in the cup."

• single open-class words or word stems are uttered

• overgeneralizations and undergeneralizations

Two-word stage (18-24 months)

• "mini-sentences" with simple semantic relations, e.g. Subject-verb Mary go, Verb-modifier Push truck, Possessor-possessed Mommy sock

• content words are used with no function words

Telegraphic Stage (24-30 months)

• "telegraphic" sentence structures of lexical rather than functional or grammatical morphemes (2-5 words with little extra morphology)

• morphological overgeneralization

• easier, more productive morphemes are acquired first

• the child learns 20-30 words per day

• "I can see a cow" repeated as See cow (Eve at 25 months)

• "The doggy will bite" repeated as Doggy bite (Adam at 28 months)

• Kathryn no like celery (Kathryn at 22 months)

• Baby doll ride truck (Allison at 22 months)

• Pig say oink (Claire at 25 months)

• Want lady get chocolate (Daniel at 23 months)

• "Where does Daddy go?" repeated as Daddy go? (Daniel at 23 months)

• Car going? to mean "Where is the car going?" (Jem at 21 months)

Later multiword stage (30+ months)

• Grammatical or functional structures emerge

• She's gone. Her gone school. (Domenico at 24 months)

• He's kicking a beach ball. Her climbing up the ladder there. (Jem at 24 months)

• I teasing Mummy. I'm teasing Mummy. (Holly at 24 months)

• I having this. I'm having 'nana. (Olivia at 27 months)

• I'm having this little one. Me'll have that. (Betty at 30 months)

• Mummy haven't finished yet, has she? (Olivia at 36 months)

• Children who regularly omit grammatical elements in their speech, nevertheless expect these elements in what they hear from adults, in the sense that their sentence comprehension suffers if the grammatical elements are missing or absent.