English Language Emerging subsystem

AOS2

Paralinguistic:

• 6 months of age.

• During this time babies begin to communicate in a basic form.

• They cry to signal needs such as hunger, discomfort and pain. As babies develop more control of airflow to make sounds, they begin to cough, gurgle and coo.

•  They can recognise a primary caregiver’s voice and distinguish differences in tones of voice.

Babbling:

• 6-12 months of age

• Babies experiment with making repetitive vocal sounds.

• Consonant-vowel sounds such as ‘dadda’ and ‘mamma’ are frequent. Babies can be observed making a variety of noises, often entertaining themselves and primary caregivers with vocal effects involving the vibration of their lips and poking out of their tongue.

Holophrastic:

• 12 months of age up until 18 months of age, a young child begins to utter their first words and understand that these are associated with meaning. 

• The holophrastic age sees children of this age communicate with one word and meaning several different things. For example, ‘ball’ can signal that the child recognises the physical object, or it can mean they want someone to pass them the ball. Children may vary the sound of the word in order to communicate the intended meaning.

Two word stage:

• 18 months to 24 months of age.

•  During this time children develop a greater understanding of syntactic and semantic relations as they begin to combine words. These two-word constructions mainly consist of noun and verb communications; for example ‘mamma, ball’

Telegraphic stage:

•  24-30 months of age.  This stage sees children communicate meaning by combining words while omitting grammatical function words.

• For example, ‘I go shops’ or ‘I want pat doggy’

Multiword stage:

 

30 months of age, when children begin to use grammatical function words along with content words. Sentences become more complex, demonstrating an increase of syntactic knowledge.