Phonological Development in Children

Children’s language development usually begins in their first three months. They will begin by learning to use their voice and enjoying vocal play. Babies will watch faces and mouths to try and copy movements and sounds.

A Sound Beginning is an assessment of phonological awareness at four different levels: Word Level, Syllable Level, Onset-Rime Level, and Phoneme Level. Phonological awareness is the manipulation of sounds in spoken language and is an important building block for reading. The assessment is administered orally that would include the student tapping, deleting, segmenting, and blending different sounds. Felipe’s score for each level is as follows:

During late infancy stage, an infant’s abilities to process, understand and produce language is important and begins as soon as the child is born. Infants recognize sounds in their environment, such as a mother’s voice. Infants also become aware of their native language, those babbling sounds become clear. “Ma-ma” or Da-da is usually heard and is often repeated. Babbling sounds may not refer to anything specific, “Ma-ma” can be signified as

It is believed that babies develop language when they are in the utero and it continues throughout their lifetime. By twelve weeks old, babies may register the sounds they can hear and at the same time make basic visual, auditory and tactile mind maps (Karen Kearns, 2013, P.105). This allows the infant to turn towards any familiar sounds and noises. Babies begin to communicate with people around them quite quickly. By two months old, babies begin to make ‘cooing’ and other noises; this indicates the phonological component of language development. By six to nine months babies begin to experience with a mixture of sounds, and often you will hear a baby babbling. Babbling development is similar across many different languages and even hearing impaired babies will go through this stage. They may copy the sounds they are introduced too or beginning to recognize familiar

At the age of 6-11 months babies begin to babble such things such as mama. Babies at this age often try to communicate by actions or gestures and tries to repeat simple sounds that are used a lot around them.

Next, his language is still developing at this point. I showed him a stuffed animal dog and asked him if he could identify it and tell me what it is. The infant gazed at it and responded “woof,woof,woof!” He responded by what the dog sounds like. Secondly, I asked him to point out his body parts. For example, his ears, eyes and belly button. That moment I said belly button he pointed at it. He was able to repeat names and his toys that he owned. As I began to speak in long-complex sentences he stared at me for a second and then looked away and started doing something else.

At around 4-6 months old a baby will have developed an awareness of sound in particularly a person speaking and will turn towards the sound when someone familiar speaks for example their parents. They will start to mimic sounds and start to babble and laugh. Intellectual development is rapid and although they may not be able to speak in more than just babble, their understanding will be greater and they will become much more inquisitive. They will be able to understand simple instructions such as “point to your nose.” By a year old, they’ll be able to say simple words like “Mama” and “Dada” or words with similar sounds. They may start to develop their own language with odd sounding words for common objects that take their interest. Sometimes these words will sound similar to the name of the object particularly if their parents spend time speaking to their child and repeating the names of these objects.

The communication with your child starts way before the youngster can speak. From their cry, smile, and the responses they give you to help you understand his or her needs. Language developments have different stages that children pass through to assist them in the development of speech and languages. There are a plethora of factors which can inhabitants’ a child language development. However, these are amongst the top causes for language development such as a child’s inborn ability to learn language and the language the child hears.

0 – 18 months – Babies love to listen to language and react to the tone and content of what is said to them. They particularly enjoy songs and repetitive games, as they start to learn and predict what will happen, an example being “round and round the garden” and games such as “Peek – a Boo”. By 12 months, they are trying to speak and will often use words in isolation and they will communicate what they want by pointing at an object at the same time as saying “cat”.

The article For the Love of Language by Geoffrey Cowley was published by Your Child's First Steps on October 2000. The author focuses on the importance of language and how children develop their language skills. Cowley states that the journey towards language starts in the womb and that babbling is the first step towards fluent speaking. Children also start associating names with objects around age one and children around two years old start to connect noun phrases with verb phrases. And lastly, children around seven months do not just seek out associations between words, but also extract principles governing word order. Cowley also uses terms like cochlear implant, mimicry, simple conditioning, operant conditioning, and specific language impairment (SLI).

Language development is related to this stage because language learning starts at birth. They listen to the speech of those close to them, and startle or cry if there is an unexpected noise.

| Babbling happens between 4-6 months of age. During this stage, the constant, vowel combination comes into play. As the child gets

The developmental stages of language are; pre-linguistic stage, one-word stage, two or three-word utterances, more complex sentences, further development between 3-4, and further development between 4 and 5. In the pre-linguistic stage from birth to 1 year, babies can tell the difference between voices and other sounds, they can start to use sounds such as ‘dadadadada’ or ‘mamamamama’. In the one-word stage from 12 to 18 months young children can have a variety of

However, Pinker (1994) then goes onto note that the particular sub-stage of reduplicated babbling occurs around 7-8 months, and states that the children will exercise phonemes and syllable patterns that are not specific to a singular language, but rather are seen as common across a variety of languages. Yet, Pinker (1994) does also argue that the children are able to distinguish between phonemes of their own mother tongue, which has been seen from birth, and this is seen to be more prominent by the time the child reaches the age of around 10 months. Pinker (1994) refers to this as the children no longer being ‘universal phoneticians’, and states that the children will no longer distinguish foreign phonemes.

Then, cooing appears when the child is between six to eight weeks old, where the infant demonstrates happy vowel like sounds (Hoff, 2006). At age sixteen weeks infants begin to demonstrate laughter and vocal play (Hoff, 2006). Between six and nine month old babies begin to produce babbling sounds, then they utter their first word around age one (Hoff, 2006). When children speak their first word it is usually as an isolated unit (Goldin-Meadow, 2006), and not considered a major step in phonological development (Hoff, 2006). Children then learn that their first spoken word is composed of smaller parts, which is known as morphology, and that the word can be used as a building block for larger sentences called syntax (Goldin-Meadow, 2006). A child’s first word goes farther then communicating a message between the child and communicative partner, the word retains symbolic meaning (Goldin-Meadow, 2006). At age eighteen months phonological processes develop, in which the child’s speech characteristics begin to transform (Hoff, 2006). Subsequent to eighteen months the child’s vocabulary grows and with this growth the child is able to phonemically represent a sound with the mental representation of every word that possesses a sound (Hoff, 2006).