Language Acquisition: Theories and Stages of Development

Language Acquisition Theories

Imitation Theory

Children hear speech around them and copy it. When a child is raised in an English-speaking environment, they acquire English. Although, mistakes such as over-generalization ("goed" and "bes") are predictable and consistent.

Reinforcement Theory

Adults coach children when using language by praise and by correcting them. Parents may sometimes correct the truth of the statement rather than the form. The children's mistakes are often rule-governed (perhaps by always adding the suffix -ed to form past tense).

Active Construction of a Grammar Theory

Rules are hypothesized by the linguistic inputs recognized by children acquiring language. As children continuously receive language input, their language is revised to more and more become a model of adult grammar. This accounts for the fact that children can create novel sentences unlike those heard from adults.

Stages of Language Acquisition

1. Cooing and Babbling

The first stage of language development is known as the prelinguistic, babbling, or cooing stage. During this period, which typically lasts from the age of three to nine months, babies begin to make vowel sounds such as oooooo and aaaaaaa. By five months, infants typically begin to babble and add consonant sounds to their sounds such as ba-ba-ba, ma-ma-ma, or da-da-da.

2. One-Word Stage

The second stage is known as the one-word or holophrase stage of language development. Around the age of 10 to 13 months, children will begin to produce their first real words. While children are only capable of producing a few, single words at this point, it is important to realize that they are able to understand considerably more. Infants begin to comprehend language about twice as fast as they are able to produce it.

3. Two-Word Stage

The third stage begins around the age of 18 months, when children begin to use two-word sentences. These sentences usually consist of just nouns and verbs, such as "Where daddy?" and "Puppy big!"

4. Telegraphic Speech

The final stage of language acquisition is the telegraphic stage. 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. Sometime during this stage, the child begins to see the links between words and objects, and therefore overgeneralization comes in. Some examples of sentences in the telegraphic stage are “Mummy eat carrot”, “What her name?” and “He is playing ball.” During this stage, a child’s vocabulary expands from 50 words to up to 13,000 words. At the end of this stage, the child starts to incorporate plurals, joining words, and attempts to get a grip on tenses.

5. Later Multiword Stage

This stage is the last one, and children begin to acquire more things:

5.1 Acquisition of Syntax

Children must learn many aspects of grammar from their specific linguistic environment. English-speaking children learn that the subject comes first and that the verb precedes the object inside the VP, that English is an SVO language. Japanese Children acquire SOV language, they learn that object precedes the verb.

5.2 Forming Questions

English-speaking children must learn that yes-no questions are formed by moving the aux. to the beginning of the sentence, as: You will come home  will you come home?

Japanese children learn that to form yes-no question, the morpheme –ka is suffixed to a verb stem.

Tanaka ga sushi o tabeteiru “Tanaka is eating sushi”

Tanaka ga sushi tabateiruka “Is Tanaka eating sushi?”

Children extract from the linguistic environment those rules of grammar that are language specific, such as word order and movement rules.