(Language Acquisition in Child)
Biological innateness of linguistics capacity
Stage in the Development of language
Anyone concerned with the study of human nature and human capacities must some-how come to grips with the fact that all normal humans acquire language, whereas acquisition of even its barest rudimenta is quite beyond the capacities of an otherwise intelligent ape.
N. Chomsky. Language and Mind. top
Language development occurs in all children with normal brain function, regardless of race, culture, or general intelligence. In other words, the capacity to development lamguage is a capacity of the human species as whole. And all languages share general abstract properties.
And in very short period of time (a span of 4 to 5 years) children are
able to develop very complex linguistic systems, moving from a one word stage to
multiword stages,on the basis of limited and often fragmentary data. top
Begins to 5 to 6 months: Babbling
In this stage, the child utters sound and sound sequences (syllables such as ba, ma, ga) that are as yet meaningless but nevertheless recognizable as being more language like than earlier infant cries.
Begins to 6 to 8 months: The one word stage
The babbling prase gradually gives way to the earliest recognizable stage of language, often referred to as the one word stage. At some point in the late part of the first year of life or the early part of the second year, the child will begin using recognizable words of the native language. These words are usually the names of family people, animals, and objects in the child’s environment (mama, dada, kitty, doggie, ball, botlle, cup) and words indicating certain actions and demands(more! No!). Viewed from the perspective of adult grammar, the kind of words that occur at this stage include simple noun and verbs; there are as yet very few so-called function words (prepositions, articles, auxiliary, verbs, interrogative, words) in the child’s language.
During the second year of life: Multi word stage
The child’s utterances gradually beome longer, and the one word stage gives way to multiword stage.
One child might enter the two words stage at 20 months of age, and another might enter the same stage at 27 months. In general, the multiword stages we will describe here begin roughly in the second half of the child’s second year and extend roughly in the child’s fifth year.
Table; Common types of utterances found in the early multiword stage top
Bloom, L.1970.Language Development: From and Function in Emerging Grammar,
MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Brown, R. 1970. The first sentences of child and chimpanzee, in Selected
Psycholinguistics Papers, Free Press, New York.
Chomsky,
N.1969. Language and Mind , Psychology Today, February 1969.
Klima, E., and U. Bellugi. 1976. The Signs of Language, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Mass.
Linden,
E.1976.Apes, Men and Language,Pelican books, Baltimore, Md.
Radford, A. 1990. Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax: the Nature
of Early child Grammar of English.Oxford: Blackwell.