The acquisition of linguistic comprehension and expression skills is a cumulative process that begins with the birth of the baby. As soon as he arrives into the world, the baby begins to hear the phonemes and identify the verbal structures that he will gradually acquire in order to communicate with those around him and thus meet his needs.
In this article we will describe the stages of language development in young children from the first undifferentiated vocalizations to the acquisition of the complex components of speech that in the long term will allow the improvement of communicative abilities.
The main stages of language evolution are the following:
1. The preverbal or prelinguistic period
At the beginning of life, babies make sounds that are increasingly communicative and close to language. Maternal or maternal speech, characterized by a slower rhythm frequent repetitions, shorter sentences, grammatical simplification and clear pronunciation, can be helpful in the progressive development of the child’s linguistic understanding.
Preverbal interactions between the baby and other people are classified as protoconversations because they have a structure similar to that of dialogues. This language background is complemented by non-verbal responses such as manual gestures or facial expressions.
Among the prelinguistic signs, the “protos” stand out. Protoimperatives appear around nine months ; The baby points to an object to indicate to another person that he wants it. We are talking about protodeclaratives, which develop at twelve months, when a similar gesture has the objective of drawing the adult’s attention so that they notice something.
In the first year of life, babies’ sounds advance from the first reflex vocalizations, such as grunts and cries, to coos (consonants, vowels or simple combinations such as “gu”). and babbling, consisting of the production of syllabic chains ; Initially these are repeated, but later different syllables are combined.
The first words appear at approximately twelve months of age. At this time, babies tend to omit and replace phonemes, as well as bring the pronunciation of two successive consonants closer together to make it easier; This is known as “assimilation.”
2. The holophrasic period
The term “holophrase” is used to talk about the sentences made up of a single word , which are characteristics of the second stage of language development. During the holophrasic period, words fulfill functions that will later correspond to phrases.
The meaning of holophrases depends largely on the context in how they are pronounced and non-verbal language. Thus, if a baby says “bibe” she is probably asking to be given the bottle, but if she points to it it is possible that she wants to say “This is a bottle”, for example.
The holophrase will constitute the core of linguistic development: despite the lack of grammaticality of these constructions, its appearance indicates that the baby understands that verbalizations have the basic objective of transmitting a certain meaning to other people.
Babies usually reach the holophrasic period when they are about a year old. Later Your vocabulary will increase quickly and intensely and little by little they will begin to combine different words.
3. The first word combinations
The holophrasic period ends shortly before the age of two. At this age the baby’s vocabulary has become very complex, so that he is already able to combine words and, therefore, meanings In this way, subjects and predicates appear explicitly for the first time, although it is not yet clear that the child distinguishes between categories of words.
Between the ages of two and three, children begin to combine three or more words on a regular basis, producing surprisingly rich sentences. They also learn to use different intonations that allow them to use the interrogative mood, for example.
The first word combinations They are known as “telegraphic speech.” because little ones ignore the less informative components of sentences, such as determiners and conjunctions, giving priority to verbs and nouns; The latter constitute the bulk of the words learned during this stage of linguistic explosion.
4. Advanced language development
In the period between approximately 16 months and 4 years, children’s vocabulary increases exponentially. When you reach this age Their linguistic ability begins to approach that of adults progressively, although it will take many years until they perfect both vocabulary and grammar.
There is a dissociation between language comprehension and production. Specifically, young children are capable of understanding complex sentences that they will not be able to generate on their own until more than two months later.
There are two types of very frequent errors during the language acquisition period: overextensions and underextensions The first are generalizations consisting of using a word to designate other objects, such as calling all mammals “dog”; infraextensions or subgeneralizations are errors opposite to these.
As children grow, different milestones occur that will be fundamental for the development of adult language. Among others, the identification of irregular forms, the acquisition of verbal modes and the progress of metalinguistic and metacognitive knowledge are of great importance.
