For children learning their
native language, linguistic competence develops in stages;
The babbling phase occurs from around six to eight months
old. In this phase, the infant begins to “babble” and makes noises and
syllables that are not yet words.
The holophrastic stage or also called the one-word
stage, in this phase the infant begins to learn and speak single words like, “mama” and “dada.”
The two-word stage, this stage takes place from eighteen to
twenty-four months old.
The telegraphic stage takes place from two to three
years old. Over time, children begin to expand their two-word phrases into
short sentences.
Despite the proposed theories on language acquisition,
none of them can explain why children can create new sentences.
Imitation
does not work because children produce sentences never
heard before, such as "cat stand up table." Even when they try to
imitate adult speech, children cannot generate the same sentences because of
their limited grammar.
Reinforcement
also does not work because it actually seldom occurs
and when it does, the reinforcement is correcting pronunciation or
truthfulness, and not grammar.
Analogy also cannot explain language acquisition. Analogy involves the
formation of sentences or phrases by using other sentences.
-Interesting fact about acquiring sign language is
that when deaf babies are not exposed to sign language, they will create their
own signs, complete with systematic rules.
-Deaf babies acquire sign language in the same way
that hearing babies acquire spoken language:
– babbling, holophrastic stage, telegraphic stage.
Bilingualism
refers to the ability to use two languages in everyday life. Bilingualism is
common and is on the rise in many parts of the world, with perhaps one in three
people being bilingual or multilingual. Some parents are natives of different
countries and many times the parents teach their children a different language
than the mother tongue, this means that the child will develop two grammar and
two lexicons.
The acquisition of a second language is a very
different process and something important to mention is that not all the people
who try to learn a second language do not reach a native grammatical competence
as in L2, especially with regard to pronunciation, because we can have accents
and even make mistakes for example, L2 people often make mistakes in word
order, especially early in their development, as well as morphological mistakes
in grammatical gender.
