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Stages of child language acquisition From approximately 0 to 4 months, child sounds are limited to reflexive crying.

This is their only way to express their feelings.This is their first production of what scholars call vegetative sounds.By roughly 4 to 6 months of age babies start to make many more sounds.Before speaking words, babies go through a period of babbling, in which they are practicing the sounds, intonations and rhythm of language. So far we have looked at various ways of accounting for our phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic competence in our language(s). This gives us some idea of what exactly constitutes our linguistic knowledge. Now maybe we can begin to appreciate just what a child does when s/he learns language: What exactly does a child do? Whatever it is, it's universal -it is acquired regardless of culture, language, class, etc. (e.g. Polish case system is easily learned, Hanunoo color terms, Japanese topic- comment structure, etc.) -it's effortless. Language acquisition occurs in stages: 1) BABBLING (+/- 6 months) -child produces the full range of possible speech sounds-even those which do not occur in speech heard in immediate environment, (the TARGET LANGUAGE) and which s/he may later find "impossible" to reproduce when learning a foreign language. 2) HOLOPHRASTIC / ONE-WORD STAGE: (+/- 12-14 months) -the words produced in holophrastic speech are not just any words. For example you get: cookie drink bad fast go yes/no But never: *in *the *and Remember the distinction? It looks again as though the distinction between OPEN CLASS and CLOSED CLASS words comes into play. This, then is further evidence to the PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY of that division. These single words may even function as illocutionary acts: May ASSERT/COMMAND/QUESTION. 3) TWO-WORD STAGE (+/- 24 months) -still virtually no closed class words -some pronouns, especially ME/YOU. How can you tell the difference between a two-word utterance and two one-word utterances?

-intonation -structure (often N V) 4) TELEGRAPHIC SPEECH (e.g. for English) -no 3-word stage -basically English sentences, but still without closed class items. -some affixes (past tense marker, plural) -SVO word order (almost invariable) -constant changing/adding of rules e.g. Labov and Labov studied their daughter Jessie's acquisition of inversion in Wh-questions: Adult rule of inversion: What do you want? Where have you been? Why are you crying? Who did you see? How will you do that? That is, MODAL/HAVE/BE inverts with subject. Child speech is more likely to contain: What you want? Where you have been? Why you are crying? Who you saw/see? How you will do that? -Looks as though, initially, there is NO RULE OF INVERSION. -Then a rule is hypothesized, but its domain is limited. -Domain of rule gradually enlarges until it is the same as adults'. In the light of these data, let's consider some hypotheses which have been proposed to account for how a child learns language: -Child memorizes sentences (SILLY) -Child learns by uttering random strings and having only the correct ones reinforced. (The 'behaviorist'/Skinnerian view) -Innate programming

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