The way in which children acquire language is often seen as miraculous, in the sense that, even today, we do not know exactly how the process works. For this reason, the subject has captured the minds of eminent philosophers, who debate over whether we are born with an innate ability to develop a language, and language acquisition is, therefore, natural, or whether it is purely to do with social and cultural effects. To a newborn baby, language is meaningless. However, within one or two days, a child can recognise its mother’s voice, and within six months, it can differentiate between different tones. The first word is spoken between twelve and eighteen months, and by the age of three, most children can speak in complex sentences. No other species has developed this level of communication, and this is why it inspires awe and disbelief among many.
The five stages of pre-verbal communication are concerned with pragmatics and phonology. Between zero and eight weeks, babies learn to make noises and utter reflexive noises to express their feelings, wants and needs. For example, by making a whining sound when it feels hungry and receiving food in response, a baby learns that this expression of noise holds a certain meaning.
Eight to twenty weeks is known as the ‘cooing stage’, and during this time babies combine a vowel and a consonant to create sounds such as ‘goo’ and ‘ga’. Between twenty and fifty weeks, babies engage in ‘verbal scribbling’ or ‘verbal play’ and begin to experiment more with language, producing a wider variety of utterances. By experimenting in this way, babies rapidly expand their vocabulary, discovering new combinations of noises, each with their own distinct meaning. They also begin to acknowledge some of the conventions of conversation, such as turn-taking.
The babbling stage occurs at around nine months. At this point, a baby will produce a lesser variety of noises and their utterances become more consistent. Soon after this, between nine and eighteen months, is the melodic utterance stage. During this stage, a child develops an understanding of pitch, intonation and rhythm and how this affects the meaning of their noises. Children begin to learn that there is a lot more to language than simply the formation of the words themselves. Children can be seen to be almost able to speak by matching the prosodic features of familiar phrases, such as the ‘round and round the garden’ rhyme and ‘all gone’.
Liz Cooper - A 22 year old media graduate from northern England, Liz now lives in London where she undertakes freelance television and writing work. A ...
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