THE STAGES OF CHILDREN’S LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

THE STAGES OF CHILDREN’S LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

 

            First Language Acquisition' or also known as the 'Child Language Acquisition' is a process whereby children from infancy through early school years acquire their first languages to communicate with other people. There are four stages how children acquire their first language. They are: cooing noise, begin to say simple words, try to the real communication, and start to develop more and more complex words in a grammatical concept or rule.

             The first stage of children’ first acquisition is cooing noises. At the age 0-10 weeks, crying will be generally the only sound communication method. They also start with vowel ‘A’ sounds. Then, at the age 10-30 weeks, they begin to use consonant and vowel sounds. After that, the infants make different cooing noises – e.g. ‘coo’, ‘goo’, ‘ga-ga’, ‘naa-naa’, ‘waa-waa’. Those are the first languages which are expressed by baby. In this stage, the babies try to express what they want but the babies only can speak goo-goo-gaa-gaa to express anything. Whether baby is happy or hungry, baby always speak those words.

             The second stage appears when children begin to say simple word, such as ‘mama’ and ‘papa’. Those words are told by the babies at the age of 7-12 months. This stage is also known as “Babbling”. In this stage, children have memorized some word in their mind. They also try to imitate what is other people around them say. Then they say in simple word to express something.

            In the third stage, children try to the real communication. This stage begins when the babies are in the age of 1-3 years. In this stage, children are accumulating more words. They start to say in a short sentence into ungrammatical, such as “give milk” means that they want milk and “daddy home” means that their father has returned. He or she will even ask 2-word questions like "Where ball?" "What's that?" "What that?"

            In the fourth stage, children start to develop more and more complex word in a grammatical concept or rule. In the age four and five, they can indentify word whether its word plural or singular such as book and books. They already know to arrange a sentence with Subject + Verb + Complement, such as “I play a ball with my friends”. He or she also can construct long and detailed sentences, like: "We went to the park but we had to come home early because my dog is sick". In this stage, the children will speak clearly and fluently in an easy-to-listen-to voice. Most sounds are pronounced correctly, though he or she may be lisping as a four year old, or, at five, still have difficulty with "r", "v" and "th".

            In conclusion, the children are definitely acquiring their first language to communicate with other people. The process to acquire the children’ first language is certainly through the four stages. The stages are: cooing noise, begin to say simple words, try to the real communication,

 and start to develop more and more complex words in a grammatical concept or rule.