NOTTING HILL COLLEGE

Basma Mohamed Mohamed Okasha

Module 1, assignment 1,

Question 5, describe the various stages of first language acquisition

First Language acquisition is a process where children acquire their first language
subconsciously without tutoring. The children acquire their native language through some
stages naturally in order to communicate with others starting from cooing, babbling,
holophrastic, the two-word stage and then telegraphic stage and later multi-word stage.

According to Fromkin (1983, P. 326), there is a difference between language acquisition and
language learning, language acquisition example is like (walking) as the child is able to walk and
no one teaches him how to walk, whereas, language learning example is like (reading) as the
child is not able to read so he need to be taught how to read. According to cognitive theory the
language is part of cognitive development as children discover the world through their senses
“language acquisition is a matter of growth and maturation of relatively fixed capacities, under
appropriate external conditions” (Chomsky,2009, P. 101-102). So children go through stages in
order to acquire their native language as they are not born with the grammar rules and
structures in their mind.

These stages are: first, pre-talking stage “cooing” it starts from (o to 6 months), the children at
this age pay attention to sounds they hear and produce sounds like (crying, whimpering and
cooing) as a response to human sounds or to show satisfaction and happiness. The produced
noise by children in all language communities are the same as it has been noticed that even the
children who are born deaf produce the same sounds as normal children. Children also produce
back vowel sounds at this age like (oh-uh) but they are not able to produce consonant like (m or
p ). Second, babbling stage which starts (from 6 to 8 months). “Babbling is the sounds which
infants produce as consonant –vowel combination” (Steinberg, 2003, P. 147). The children
produce many sounds at this age like (ma-ma/ba-ba/na-na) to show pleasure and pain and they
listen to speakers and turn to them when they speak. Furthermore, no one teaches children
how to produce these sounds even the deaf children produce the same sounds and babble like
normal children; also the children who are born of non-speaking parents produce the same
babbling too. Moreover, children can differentiate between the sounds of their language so
they maintain them and the others which are not a part of their language so they suppress
them. Another point is, babbling is not associated with meaning and it’s hard to distinguish
between American and Japanese babies at this stage. Next, holophrastic stage which starts
(from 9 to 18 months), holophrastic is defined from holo “complete” and “phrase” or
“sentence” which indicates the first word that children produce to represent one sentence. For
example, “up” means “pick me up” and later on it can be “get up”, and here the children learn
that the sounds are related to meaning and they extend the meaning of the word they produce.
According to some child researchers children use the words in order to express their emotions
“i.e. (no) to not do something” or desires “i.e. (up) to pick him up” and recognize the name of
familiar objects “i.e. chair, bag, dog, shoes”.

Then, the two-word stage which starts (from 18 to 24 months), the children at this age can
produce consonant sounds and mini sentence using two words with semantic and syntactic
relation “i.e. bye-bye, hi mum, my car”. Bloom has noted that the mini sentence can express
lots of different grammatical relations ,for example, the sentence “ mummy sock” can be used
as (subject+ object) when the child want his mum to put his sock on, and can be used as a
possessive relation when pointing to the sock. However, at this stage the using of pronouns is
rare. After that, the telegraphic stage which starts (from 24 to 30 months ), it’s called
telegraphic as children sound as if they are reading a western-union message because they use
only the words that carry meaning and miss the function words “i.e. in, on, at” when producing
these utterances,”i.e. dog stand up table” . “Telegraphic is merely a descriptive term because
the child does not deliberately leave out the non- content words, as does an adult sending a
telegram” ( Fromkin, 1983, P. 330). The children at this age are able to produce utterances
which have similar structure to adults’ sentences as they are able to produce a sentence using
three words or more which shows that they acquire the principals of sentence formation
” i.e. he play football, the sentence contains noun phrase and verb phrase”. They also
understand the contrasting meaning “i.e. hot & cold, stop & go”. Finally, later multi-word stage
which starts (from 30+months)” at this stage is fastest increase in vocabulary with many new
additions every day, no babbling at all, utterances have communicative intent” (Bolinger, 2002,
P. 283). It differs from a child to another to understand everything they hear because
utterances become more complex. Children start to use morphemes such as (in, on), add “s” to
plural ending and “ed” to verb ending.

In short, language development starts from the first day after birth and it’s acquired in
subconscious and natural stages, as children are not taught to form a sentence by adding or
putting verb and noun together but they acquire that through stages. These stages are similar
among children all over the world. The children go through these stages in order to
communicate with human being, so they start to cry and make noise in “cooing” stage to
express discomfort or hunger then produce sounds and pay attention to speakers to express
pleasure or pain in “babbling stage , next, they produce a word which has meaning in
“holophrastic stage”, then “two words” stage and after that they can produce utterances in
“telegraphic stage”, finally they can produce more complex utterances in “multi-word stage”
References:
Bloom, Lois Masket. "Language development: Form and function in emerging grammars." (1968).

Chomsky, Noam. Cartesian linguistics: A chapter in the history of rationalist thought. Cambridge
University Press, 2009.

Fromkin, Victoria, and J. Rodman. "An introduction to language.− New York." (1983).

Hutauruk, Bertaria Sohnata. "Children First Language Acquisition at Age 1-3 Years Old in Balata." IOSR
Journal of Humanities and Social Science (IOSR-JHSS) 20.8 (2015): 51-57.