1. STAGES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
1.1. Passage 1 Babbling
1.1.1. Within a few weeks of being born the baby begins to recognize it’s mothers’ voice.
1.1.2. There are two sub-stages
1.1.2.1. the baby relating to its surroundings and only during 5/6 – 8 month period does the baby begin using it’s vocals.
1.1.2.1.1. During these months the baby hears sounds around them and tries to reproduce them, albeit with limited success.
1.1.2.2. From 8 months to 12 months the baby gains more and more control over not only it’s vocal
1.1.2.2.1. 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.
1.2. Passage 2 Holophrastic / One-word stage
1.2.1. This stage is characterized by one word sentences.
1.2.2. Infants use these sentence primarily to obtain things they want or need, but sometimes they aren’t that obvious.
1.2.3. The infant is ready to advance to the next stage when it can speak in successive one word sentences.
2. By: Amnerys Almanza Phonoaudiology UDELAS
3. Language is a cognition that truly makes us human.
3.1. there is no other species known to date that can express infinite ideas with a limited set of symbols
3.2. Infants as young as 12 months are reported to have sensitivity to the grammar needed to understand causative sentences
4. Theories
4.1. Early Theories
4.1.1. One of the earliest scientific explanations of language acquisition was provided by Skinner.
4.1.2. As one of the pioneers of Behaviorism, he accounted for language development by means of environmental influence.
4.1.3. Skinner argued that children learn language based on behaviorist reinforcement principles by associating words with meanings.
4.2. Universal Grammar
4.2.1. Chomsky argued that children will never acquire the tools needed for processing an infinite number of sentences if the language acquisition mechanism was dependent on language input alone.
4.2.2. Universal Grammar: an idea of innate, biological grammatical categories, such as a noun category and a verb category that facilitate the entire language development in children and overall language processing in adults.
4.2.3. according to the Universal Grammar account, children instinctively know how to combine a noun and a verb into a meaningful, correct phrase.
4.3. Contemporary Research
4.3.1. Researchers started to suggest that instead of having a language-specific mechanism for language processing, children might utilise general cognitive and learning principles.
4.3.2. It is suggested that children are sensitive to patterns in language which enables the acquisition process.
4.3.3. Children are considered to acquire their first instances of third singular forms as entire phrasal chunks without the ability of teasing the finest grammatical components apart.