Back to: Language Competence and Communication Skills
How is The First Language Acquired
Acquisition of the first language, often known as the mother tongue or L1, is a natural process that happens without the aid of a teacher or tutor.
Even the initial syllable in his own tongue is spoken slowly by the toddler. if the youngster, who is between the ages of nine months and one year, speaks at all. The youngster can utilise short phrases starting at age two, and by age three, a whole sentence. He can converse by the time he is four, and by the time he is five, he has learned the basics of the language, but there are numerous grammatical mistakes. Everything proceeds in a stage-by-stage, predictable, and organic order.
Five consecutive stages have been identified in the development of language in children:
Cooing or babbling stage:
The baby makes certain sounds during the first year of life, at least during the first six weeks after birth, that aren’t very unique. The youngster attempts to make eye contact and gestures during this time.
But around six weeks, one might start to hear cooing or babbling, which are specific sounds like ma, da, and wah. Additionally known as the pre-speech stage. The infant gains the ability to develop various intonation patterns up until week 8, which prepares him for employing shorter utterances and nonverbal clues.
Holophrastic Stage:
The holophrastic stage, which occurs between the ages of 10 and 13 months, is characterised by a child’s tendency to speak in single words. Such one-word expressions as “botty” can be used to refer to both the sensation bottle and to order someone to provide the person the bottle.
Two-word stage:
The kid should be able to create two-word utterances by the age of 18 months, which typically consist of a noun, a verb, and a modifier. These include negative, declarative, and interrogative expressions like:
- Daddy big
- Where ma?
- Not egg
- More sugar
Multiple word sentences stage:
By the time the kid is two and a half years old, he should be able to use grammatical morphemes, prefixes, and suffixes to change the meaning of words. Almost full sentences with generally sound grammar are increasingly common, however the distinctions between regular and irregular forms of words, particularly verbs, will still be present.
Complex structures stage
The youngster starts to create sophisticated grammatical structures around the age of three by employing conjunctions, prepositions, and other words.
It is clear that the youngster has mastered the use of prepositions, embedded phrases, and auxiliary verbs. While mistakes would still be there, a five-year-old can employ negative, questions, imperatives, and other structures rather well. He can only be considered a flawless adult speaker of his L1 at the age of ten.
The aforementioned stages, which occur predictably, have been referred to as the crucial phases in language development. Since they are attempting to acquire language grammar in their own way at this point, children oppose any teaching from adults or parents.
