Psycholinguistics

How children learn language

The development of language production (1)

1.      Vocalization, bubbling, and speech

a.       Vocalization to babbling

Prior to uttering speech sounds, infants make a variety of sounds, crying, cooing, gurgling. Infants everywhere seems to make the same variety of sounds, even children who are born deaf.

b.      Babbling to speech

It is from the advanced stage of babbling that children move into uttering their first words. Often this occurs at around one year of age but can occur much earlier or much later.

2.      Early speech stages

a.       Naming

Actually this is not only because there is a very wide range of individual differences but also because the determination of just when a word has been laearned is not easy to make and is not standardized.

b.      Holophrastic

Children do not only use single words to refer to objects , they also use single words to express complex thoughts which involve those objects.

c.       Telegraphic

·         Variety of purposes and semantic relations

·         Low incidence of function words

·         Close approximation of the language’s word order

d.      Morphemic

·         The brown morpheme acquisition research

·         Brown’s order of morpheme acquisition

·         Why this order of acquisition