language acuqisition article

Language acquisition article

You are writing for the new ‘You and your baby’ magazine which is just about to hit the high streets, for people expecting their first child and you are commissioned to write an article on children’s language acquisition. All backgrounds 19-40 lively, entertaining, and comprehensible. – 500 words.

“What do you want little one? Are you hungry? Do you need a nappy change? Are you too hot? What do you want?”
This is one of the frustrating questions you will have to constantly deal with through trial and error as you begin to navigate the joys and frustrations of parenthood.
Amazingly, studies have shown that babies pick up different consonant and vowels sounds from as early as birth. At just three months, these signs begin to develop as they acquire language skills. As they attentively watch and listen they begin to imitate the movements of another’s mouth. Indeed, from as early as two months, babies also tend to show a preference for their mother’s voice and language (Mehler et al., 1988). The imitations of sound suggest that language is acquired through mimicry (BF Skinner). Between two and five months, babies begin to vocalise noises such as “mmm” and “brrr” as they begin to learn the different sounds from different parts of their mouths and develop their vowels during this period. Sounds such as ‘bgd’ come before ‘fs’ or vz’.
By eighteen months, babies are able to vocalise their communication and have developed the holophrastic stage and use single words to communicate. They also ‘babble’ using a wide range of vocal tunes and phonetic units. They use gestures to facilitate their communication and point to familiar toys and objects such as “mamma” and “walkie”.
At around 2 years infants begin to use more recognizable words and less ‘baby talk’. They tend to know their own name and often talk to themselves especially when playing. This is the two-word stage where they begin to develop short sentence structure to communicate such as “more biccie” and “ doggie gone”. At this stage, playtime is often essential to their learning curve. As children explore new objects and materials they learn through social activities with other children and adults. Simple actions such as taking turns to throw a ball with a child should be modelled with the child and gestures and clapping for a good throw will reinforce communication.
At around thirty months, children move on to more complex sentence structure called the telegraphic stage. They learn inflectual morpheme (the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning such as ‘ing’ and auxiliary verbs such as ‘is’ and was’. Sentences are full and complete and describe a situation using adjectives also begin to develop propositions such as ‘in’ and the plural ‘s’.
As parents, you also play a crucial role in the development of language in your child. Children cannot learn language alone but are dependant on their parents and other important figures to guide them through this process. Certainly, babies are very receptive to their environment and pick up the complexities of language with relative ease. If you do feel that your child is having problems with distinguishing sounds and has not moved on from the holophrastic stage then it is important to refer to specialist as soon as possible.