Language acquisition in children

“The acquisition of something as complex as human language must be among our greatest achievements.”(Barry Blake 2008: 250) Humans have a very unique ability of being able to talk to one another through speech and have an extensive conversation.  Speech is acquired very early on in life, babies listen to words that their parents say and attempt to say them as well. Although babies don’t say complete words they still learn certain sounds. The most astounding thing that modern science has discovered is that babies, while still in the womb have the ability to listen to speech and once born, retain that knowledge ready to start learning words.

Speech is the act of expressing or describing thoughts, feelings, or perceptions by the use of words. Sound is used for a huge range of different ways to communicate, from talking to singing, laughing to crying and all the sounds originate from the vocal cords. The act of speaking is made up of sounds such as ‘sh’, ‘u ’ and ‘t’ making the word shut, the word ‘shut’ can be used in a group of words such as ‘Excuse me could you please shut the back door properly.’ making a sentence that can be spoken.

Learning to speak is one of the most difficult challenges a child undergoes without even knowing it. Baby babble, or making sound is the first stage of learning how to pronounce full words, this can also be labelled as the cognitive stage of language. Learning words, Is the second stage of learning language. In this stage babies join sounds together to create simple word such as mum and dad this can also be labelled the associative stage of language. The final stage is, learning sentences and how they are structured at this stage language is at the autonomous stage. Such as saying “I want a cookie” not “Want I a cookie”. As babies develop into grown humans their vocabulary widens and their selection of words grows. A fully developed human has an approximate vocabulary of about fifteen thousand words, compared to Shakespeare who had a thirty thousand word vocabulary.

Babies star to learn language while still in the womb, listening to their mothers’ voice as they develop, but the language in children is in development from the moment they are born to about the age of ten. Even though we never stop learning language the majority of language learnt is when children are attending their first five years of school. Despite their being 171476 words in the second edition of the 20^th volume of the Oxford English dictionary it is said that around 47000 of those words are obsolete.

In final children have a long journey in acquiring language, but we never really stop learning language. It evolves and changes as new generations become lazier with speech and add new contractions such as ‘LOL’ and ‘Thx’.

Bibliography:

The Sound of Language, Available [http://whyfiles.org/058language/baby_talk.html]

Babies’ Language Starts in the Womb, Available [http://www.viewzone.com/babytalk.html]

How Do Children Learn Language, 2012, Available [http://giftedkids.about.com/od/gifted101/a/language_learning.htm]

How Children Learn Language, 2012, Available [http://www.early-advantage.com/articles/universalgrammar.aspx]

When Do People Learn Languages, Available [http://www.zompist.com/whylang.html]