Stages of first language development

Before children learn to match words to the concepts they refer to, they have to go through several important preliminary stages to familiarise themselves with non-linguistic forms of communication such as facial expressions, gaze and gestures (Brown 2000:16).

During their first year children are often heavily dependent on the non-linguistic cues involved in communication such as gestures, actions, facial expressions, gaze and tone of voice. Some of the earliest sounds include involuntary grunts and sighs. Smiling begins within the first few months as an involuntary muscle spasm (Brown 2000:17). Gradually, children realise that smiling and crying can elicit responses from other people and begin using them as conscious behaviour. From the second month children start using voluntary contented cooing sounds. Months 4-7 are characterised by vocal play. According to Brown (2000:18), babies start experimenting with their vocal organs, producing shrieks, murmurs, growls and shouts.

Children acquire their L1 uniformly irrespective of the diverse cultural backgrounds in which they find themselves. During the language acquisition process several stages take place.

2.3.1.1 Cooing

There is strong biological evidence that indicates that children are born with the ability to perceive human speech sounds. Researchers like Berko Gleason (1989:42) claims that children as young three days can hear and distinguish their mothers’ voice from other voices. This ensures that babies are receptive to the speech sounds of the person who is most likely to interact with them the most, that is, their mothers.

Even though the ability to produce speech sounds is present from birth, the ability to produce sounds that resemble human speech only emerges gradually as a result of

maturational changes during the first two months. It is only during the third and fourth month that consonants start to appear in babies’ cooing sounds.

2.3.1.2 Babbling

The babbling stage begins when children are six months old. At this stage they begin to explore the ability of their vocal organs and soon discover that they can make loud and soft noises. The early period of babbling is unintentional and therefore not communicative. This early stage of babbling often involves re-duplication of sounds, like reproducing vocalisations containing repeated sequences of consonants and vowels such as baba or dada (Brown 2000:20).

From about nine months babies’ babbling becomes variegated, that is, consonants and vowels are not repeated, but vary from syllable to syllable. During this stage children also learn to imitate the stress or intonation patterns of sentences they hear around them. Babbled strings of sounds are produced with a variety of stress and intonation patterns that resemble those of simple sentences, for example, rising intonation at the end of a sequence to signal a question. Children often babble like this in play situations, for instance, when paging through books. From their vocalisation they appear to be talking to someone or commenting on the pictures in the book.

During the later stages of babbling Brown (2000:21) claims that certain forms start being used fairly consistently in certain contexts, accompanied by eye-contact with the caretaker and gestures like reaching, pointing, grasping and rejection movements. These word-like forms are known as the pro-words and are basically idiosyncratic words invented by the child rather than modelled on actual adult words.

2.3.1.3 One word

The one-word stage is the period from the child’s first word to the time when the child starts to put two words together. This period can last from one to two years, and is universal, confirming the nativist theory that children are born with innate language abilities (Brown 2000:22).

One of the major problems in the study of the one-word stage, according to (Brown2000:22), is determining what the child actually means when she uses a word. Because context, gestures and intonation patterns always accompany early word use, they provide the caretaker with cues as to what the child might possibly be talking about. Even so Foster-Cohen (1999:30) claims that it is hard to be sure of the child’s meaning.

Children’s first words follow the same articulatory patterns of babbling, that is, a preference for duplication and open syllables, with the difference that words have a

fairly stable form and are used to communicate a particular meaning. Children’s pronunciation improves gradually and their words come to sound more and more like the adult target words. Foster-Cohen (1999:35) claims that sometimes children’s pronunciation gets worse before it gets better.

Children’s first words refer to objects in their environment, actions or states and words that facilitate social interaction. The most common of these words includes objects and living things. Objects, that the child can manipulate, function as words such as no and please. Children however use less common words like names for clothing because they cannot easily manipulate names of places or objects in the environment (Cohen-Foster 1999:37).

Evidence from children’s early words show that children do not merely imitate the language used in their environment. If they did it would be expected that they first use the most frequently used words occurring in the adult language (Foster-Cohen 1999:58).

2.3.1.4 Two words

The period between fifteen months and two years marks the beginning of the two-word stage. Children now tune into the unique structural properties of the language they hear around them but often come up with creative utterances like “all gone milk”. This kind of evidence suggests that children are unconsciously constructing utterances according to some pattern, although this pattern may differ from the rules and patterns of adult grammar (Cohen-Foster 1999:38).

Like one word utterances, two word utterances consist mainly of combinations of content words like nouns and verbs. These are the kinds of words that carry the main semantic load in sentences. Functional words such as the, is, in, and that, are omitted, as they would be in a telegram. Hence their speech is sometimes referred to as telegraphic speech as it includes only the words that carry the main message.

2.3.1.5 Sentences

Once children start to put words together, their utterances quickly begin to include two- word sentences, three word sentences and even longer sentences. Brown (2000:27) claims that the length of children’s sentences increases gradually throughout pre-school and early school years as they learn the syntactic rules necessary for using functional words and creating more complex sentences. According to Brown (2000:29), children from different linguistic backgrounds achieve linguistic competence at roughly the same age, usually at six years old, in spite of structural differences between languages. By the time children start school they have internalised the majority of the rules of the language of their environment.

The order of acquisition of complex constructions seems fairly consistent with English- speaking children although it may differ slightly in other languages. The typical order of English acquisition is, according to Foster-Cohen (1999:40), present progressive - ing, prepositions, plurals, irregular past tense, possessive, corpula verb, regular tense, third person singular and auxiliaries.

Over-generalisation is a common strategy used by all children, irrespective of the language they are acquiring. This occurs when children apply the rules too widely. Over generalisation occurs once children start analysing the forms and work out the rules. Eventually children learn that there are exceptions to the general rules and start to use correct forms.