Are There Steps to Language Acquisition?

The rate that children acquire language is quite varied in the normal range of development.
Just as some children crawl or stand earlier than others, some children gain control over
language earlier than others. Within the normal range there appear to be some shared steps
to language learning regardless of the child's culture or native language. The communication
process begins with what works-eye contact, looking at a desired object, reaching, and
vocalizing. The prelinguistic part of language development begins with playing with saliva,
blowing bubbles, vocalizations, and crying. It is pragmatic: Do what works.
The first word may be a noun. (Dada is easier to say than mama.) However, first words are
more than labels for objects. First words are communicative like

"Bye-bye" and "uh

oh." Some single words are used to convey a whole sentence. These words are called
holophrases, whole phrases which are full of meaning, because they are self-contained.

"Up," for example, may mean "Pick me up now. I need to be held." The child's word for
water or drink may be used as a holophrase meaning, "I am very thirsty and need a
drink of water."

Eg Milk
Toy
Hug

After the holophrase stage children begin using words in a telegraphic fashion. Before e-mail
and telephone, people sent telegrams to communicate quickly. Because senders were
charged by the word, extraneous words were omitted-only the most important words were
selected to communicate the meaning. Telegraphic speech in children performs the same
function. Cookie Monster is a telegraphic speaker: "Me want cookie." Most often telegraphic
speech involves the pattern of noun/verb or noun/verb/object. Examples include: more apple;
doggie sleep; and baby go.
Language seems to expand dramatically after the telegraphic stage. Two-year-olds, for
example, often learn two to three new words each day (Craig & Kermis, 1995). But during the
preschool years, parents and caregivers sometimes think that children regress rather than

make linguistic progress. That is because preschoolers are learning that language has rules.
As children learn these rules they tend to make errors because they overregularize the rules.
Therefore, children generalize that if houses means more than one house, then mouses must
mean more than one mouse. Similarly, if we played and hopped, we must have also have
runned and falled. The errors actually represent progress because the child is thinking about
the structure of the language.
Language acquisition continues rapidly throughout the preschool period with children revising
simple sentence structures to form questions, make commands, and express negatives using
words like "didn't" and "won't" (Klima & Bellugi, 1966). Three-year-olds are frequently
perplexed by the use of pronouns (Me want cookie). But most pronouns are mastered by the
time a child is four or five years old. Four-year-olds can also use complex and compound
sentences and create their own words when they can't think of a real word to express their
meaning. Difficulty with some pronunciations, however, may continue into the early school
years, particularly with pronunciation of the sounds that are most difficult to produce-s, ch, sh,
z, j, v, th, zh (Rathus & Favaro, 1988).
Throughout life our receptive vocabularies, spoken or written language we understand, tend
to be greater than the language we produce. We use contextual and gestural cues to help us
understand the meanings of new words even though they might not be part of our spoken, or
expressive vocabularies. Thus vocabulary can continue to increase over a lifetime. While
vocabulary continues to increase, most children have acquired control over most constructions by age ten (Craig & Kermis, 1995).