Module 3: First Language Acquisition

• Six Stages of Language Acquisition

  • Prelinguistic Stage (0 to 6 months)
  • Babbling Stage (6-12 months)
  • First Words (12 months and up)
  • Two Word Stage (18-24 months up to 2 ½ years old)
  • Telegraphic Stage (2 ½ years old)
  • Beyond Telegraphic Stage (beginning 3 years old)
• Prelinguistic Stage


  Babies produce noise such as crying, whimpering, and cooing, but are not yet considered language since they are just involuntary responses to stimuli
• Babbling Stage


  The child seems to be experimenting in uttering sounds of language, but not yet producing any recognizable words
• First Words


  The "one word = one sentence" pattern seems to appear in the utterance of the child
• Two Word Stage


  The child starts to produce two-word utterance, more consonant sounds and vowel sounds of the native language are typically included, more words in the child's vocabulary are being added
• Telegraphic Stage


  Children start to produce more than two words together, perhaps three four, or five at a time in an utterance, their style of speaking is similar to a way of writing in a telegram, utterances exhibit phrase structure
• Beyond Telegraphic Stage


  Vocabulary development continues including different strategies, starts to ask questions that are grammatical and appropriate
• Theories of First Language Acquisition

  • Behaviorist Approach
  • Nativist Approach
  • Interactionist Approach
• Behaviorist Approach


  Children come into the world with a tabula rasa, a clean slate bearing no preconceived notions about the world or language, children are then shaped by the environment and slowly conditioned through various schedules of reinforcement, children produce linguistic responses that are reinforced
• Nativist Approach


  Language acquisition is innately determined, children are born with a special ability to discover for themselves the underlying rules of a language system, the innate property of knowledge embodied in the metaphorical "little box" in the brain is known as the Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
• Interactionist Approach


  • Cognitive Approach
  • Social Interaction Approach
  • Usage-Based Approach
• Cognitive Approach


  With the development of cognitive ability comes the development of language, exposure to the world allows a child to develop, in turn, allowing language to develop, language was a way of reflecting a child's thought process and language did not contribute to the development of thinking
• Social Interaction Approach


  Children need more opportunities for direct contact and engagement to achieve language fluency, language develops depending on social interactions, the social environment a child grows up in greatly affects how well and how quickly they develop their language skills, social interactionists stress the role of parental input language in children's language development
• Usage-Based Approach


  Language structure emerges from language use, and children build their language relying on their general cognitive skills, as word combinations are processed and produced more frequently and readily by young children over time, the children begin to perceive similarities in structure across these utterances, one must always begin with communicative function, children's early linguistic communication, the most basic unit of linguistic experience, and the one with which children begin, is not the word but the utterance
• Intention reading- the child attempts to read the speaker's intention when talking
• Pattern-finding- a child goes productively beyond individual utterances used by people around them to create linguistic schema