11.4: Stages of Language Acquisition

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Todd LaMarr

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Language Acquisition

Children will typically go through the four stages of language acquisition.

Pre-language stage (3 to 10 months) where a child makes a lot of ‘cooing’ and ‘babbling’;
The holophrastic stage (12 to 18 months) where a child starts to comprehend a single unit of utterance like ‘milk’, ‘eat’, ‘dad’, ‘brother’;
Two-word stage (18 to 20 months) where a child, through a process of acquiring two nouns or a noun and a verb (noun + verb), begins pairing two words together such as ‘baby chair’, ‘mommy eat’, ‘cat bad’;
Telegraphic speech-stage (before 3 years old) defines a stage where a child puts some words together, even if the words are in the incorrect order. It has a similar meaning as a sentence, such as ‘cookie I want’, ‘toy me fall’, but is not a complete sentence. ^{^[1]}

^{^[1]} Fitria & Musthafa (2019). Conversational Interaction to Develop the Two-Word Stage of A Child’s Second Language Acquisition. In Eleventh Conference on Applied Linguistics. Atlantis Press. CC by NC 4.0 https://www.atlantis-press.com/proceedings/conaplin-18/125911514