stages

• 0-4 months 


  cooing stage (6-8 weeks). start to make a small amount of sound. get used to moving lips and tongue. period between birth and first word spoken is the pre-language stage
• 3-6 months 


  sounds don't carry any meaning, baby just experimenting. eventually a combinaition of consonants and vowels start to carry meaning 'mmm' not a word but might mean hungry
• 6-12 months 


  argued that babbling is beginning of speech (Petitto + holowka) others say just more experimentation with sound. repeated constants/ vowel combinations 'ma-ma-ma' - reduplicated babbling
• 9 -12 months 


  9 months sound like they are talking their own language - jargon. 10 months child of different nationalities sound different
• inconsistent usage (inflections) 


  a child will use an infection correctly some of the time but this is because they have learnt the word and not the grammatical rule
• consistent usage but sometimes misapplied (inflections)


  applying a regular past tense inflection '-ed' to irregular verb. child say 'I drinked it' not ' I drunk it' - overgeneralisation or a virtuous error. understand how past tense verbs are formed but mistakenly apply the construction to an irregular verb
• consistent usage (inflection) 


  when children are able to cope with irregular forms successfully
• around 18 months (interrogatives) 


  no or not to make things negative, normally at the beginning of phrase rather then at the end
• between two and three years (infections)


  children start to use no and not in front of verbs too. they also develop the use if contacted negatives like 'cant' and 'don't two forms can get mixed up 'I cant like it'
• from 3 years upwards (inflection)


  children stop using no and not in the way they did at 18 months. they standardise their use of cant and don't and start using other negative contractions like didn't and won't. the use of 'isn't' is developed slightly later
• pre-verbal (grammatical stages - brown)


  babbling, crying, cooing developing communicative competence.
• holophrastic (grammatical stages - brown)


  one word (12-18 months) heavy reliance on non-verbal communication

  two word - beginnings of grammar understanding, coincides with the vocabulary spurt from around 18 months
• telegraphic stage (grammatical stages - brown)


  after 2 years - longer and more complex. includes key content words and function (grammatical) words often omitted
• post telegraphic (grammatical stages - brown)


  3 onwards - increasingly like adult speech
• stages of spoken language:

  pre-verbal

  holophrastic

  two word

  telegraphic

  post-telegraphic
• pre-verbal (1st stage): first noise - crying

  cooing (2 months old) - experiments with noises that can be made with mouth and tongue.

  babbling (6 months old) - resembles vowel and consonant sounds
• 2 types of babbling:

  reduplicated babbling: appears first. child repeatedly saying the same sound

  variegated babbling: variation in the consonant and vowel sounds. still doesn't resemble real words
• holophrastic (2nd stage) 12 - 18 months

  labels things around them

  whole sentence worth of meaning in just a single word

  first word usually occurs (concrete nouns)