HOW CHILDREN LEARN LANGUAGE

HOW CHILDREN LEARN LANGUAGE

1.      The development to speech production

a)    From vocalization to babbling speech

      Vocalization to babbling → Infants make a variety of sound, crying, cooing, and gurgling. Ordinarily, infants try to make babble in around the seventh month with as repeated syllable. And when infant babble they follow the intonation contour of the language which they hear.

      Babbling to speech → this condition in the stage when the children uttering their first word around one year of age but can occur much earlier or much later. Babbling begin to approach the consonant-vowel combinations of later meaningful speech.  In babbling, child chance many various articulatory in mechanism for production speech and give practice to the use of those articulator.

      Explaining the acquisition order of consonant and vowel → when we were still infants we got the consonant /k/, /g/, and /x/ that when we are children we get that consonant after we get consonant /m/, /p/, /b/, /t/ and /x/.

There  are two variables dominate this process:

a.    Visibility of articulator (it is mainly movements which the child observe an imitation). Since, noticeable mouth and lip movement are primarily involved in the articulation of certain consonant.

b.    Case of articulation as for vowel (it seems that those sound which are closest to the resting position to articulation).

So, this variable of ease and visibility of articulation is the important one of chance.

b)      Early speech stages: Naming, Holophrastic, Telegraphic and Morphemic

      Naming: one word utterances

·         Child can be said to have learned their first word when

                                                                 i.            They are able to utter a recognizable speech from and when this is done.

                                                               ii.            In conjunction with some object or event in the environment.

·         First word has been reported from as young as 4 months to as old as 18 months, or even older. On the average, it would seems that children utter their first word around the age of 10 months

·         The naming of objects is one of the first uses to which children put words or preceded by words which accompany action.

·         It appears that children first use nouns as proper nouns to refer to specific objects.

      Holophrastic functions: one word utterances

·         Using one word to expresses whole sentences.

·         Use single words to expresses complex thoughts which involved the objects, such as, ‘mama’ meaning ‘I want mama’. This aspect of one-word speech is often refers to as ‘holophrastic’ where ‘holo’ indicates whole and ‘phrase’ indicates phrase or sentences.

·          In this condition children not worry about their grammatical or sentence hood what was said. Their just communication and failures in their communication may provide children with an impetus to improving their communicative language ability.

      Telegraphic speech:  two- and three- word utterances

·         Variety of purposes and semantics relations

·         Low incidence

      Morpheme acquisition

c)      Later Speech