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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.