VCE English Language 2025 Unit 1 AOS2: 'Language Aquisition' Child Language Acquisition

What are the 4 stages of child language acquisition?

Babbling, One-word Utterances, Two-word Utterances, and the Telegraphic Stage.

When and what is the Babbling stage?

5 to 7 months. Children are experimenting with sounds, and babbling occurs the same way no matter the child’s input language, but the sound produced will narrow to match their input language over time. Intonation patterns are acquired first. Babbling is innate and occurs in hearing and non-hearing babies. Babies exposed to signing will babble with their fingers.

When and what is the One-word Utterances Stage?

12 to 18 months. In this stage, children start to associate sound with meaning, and learn to express themselves. They speak short words, usually consonant-vowel in shape, and concrete words usually come first. At this stage they are capable of saying approximately 50 words, but achieve greater expression through semantic overgeneralisation. Passive knowledge outstrips vocal ability.

When and what is the Two-word Utterances Stage?

18 to 24 months. At this stage children combine words, usually only content words. Location phrases are always used in second position. In action utterances, the agent comes first, and if the action affects an entity, the entity comes second.

When and what is the Telegraphic Stage?

24 to 30 months and beyond. Children use sentence like phrases that are mostly lacking in function words and morphemes. There is a clear hierarchal structure. ‘-ing’ is the first inflection to emerge, followed by ‘-s’ plurals. Simple prepositions also emerge at this time.

What are the three types of phonological simplification used by babies?

Deletion, Substitution, and Reduplication.

What is deletion as a form of phonological simplification?

Children often drop final consonants and unstressed syllables, and reduce consonant clusters.

What is substitution as a form of phonological simplification?

In consonant clusters, some children resort to a separate consonant not in the cluster, add a vowel between consonants, and substitute harder sounds for easier ones.

What is reduplication as a form of phonological simplification?

Children pronounce different sounds in a word the same way.

What are some patterns/trends in phonological development?

Command of vowels is achieved before command of consonants. The consonants ‘p’, ‘b’, ‘m’, ‘t’, ‘d’, ‘n’, ‘k’, and ‘g’ are acquired first. Consonants are first used correctly at the beginning of words.

When do children develop intonation?

Intonation is first used to express meaning during the first year of life. Full understanding of intonation patterns is not developed until the teenage years.

Explain lexical development.

Between 12 to 18 months, children can express a vocabulary of around 50 to 100 words, mostly nouns. A ‘vocabulary explosion’ occurs around 18 months, and verbs and adjectives are used more frequently. Between 2 and 3 years, children begin to use pronouns and contractions, and use adverbs of locations. From 3 to 4 they are used consistently, and reflexive pronouns are developed. More sophisticated conjunctions are used between 4 and 5.

What is the critical period hypothesis?

The theory that language must be acquired during a specific period of time in childhood, or it will never be fully acquired. There are different windows of time for different parts of language. Intonation and stress occur first, followed by vowels and consonants, then grammatical features during early school years.

What is the theory of universal grammar?

Accredited to linguist Noam Chomsky, the theory proposes that children are born with innate knowledge about the structure of language, allowing them to adopt any language. Children are born with a Language Aquisition Device (LAD) thar allows them to organise language into grammar. The poverty of stimulus argument argues that children’s capacity for language outstrips their exposure.

What is Usage-based Theory?

A theory by Michael Tomasello, it proposes that children acquire language through social interaction in combination with their general cognitive skills. Language learning results from the accumulation of knowledge and skills.