The Role Of Babbling On Child Language Acquisition

Language is a system in which sequences of sounds make up words to signify a person, place, idea, or object and eventually becomes a tool through which we communicate. Language development starts at birth with crying. Infants cry to communicate their needs are not being met. At around six months infants begin to form consonant- vowel chains; this is the start of babbling, an essential pre-linguistic skill and milestone in language development. Around the age of eleven months the child will say begin to say their first words, and language continues to develop throughout life. Like many other areas of development language development is influenced by the culture the infant grows up in.

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

At the age of 3 months we see early signs of phonology; children will turn their heads, and stop crying once hearing parent’s voices. They indicate contentment and amusement by smiling, and repeating sounds (e.g. cooing). (Berk, 2003). In addition babies 4-7 months notice new sounds such as the telephone. They also respond to “no” and changes in tone of voice. Early sound discrimination skills are beginning to emerge. At 6 months of age, long before they are ready to talk, babies start to organise speech into the phonemic categories of their own language. (Berk, 2003). Semantics develops at the age from 8months-1 year old as they respond to sounds such as doorbells and telephones. And begin to babble repeated consonants and vowels. The Nativist theory states that language acquisition is a biological phenomenon such as the child’s ‘inner clock’ theory and any role play between child and carer and by the environment is something less important, which theoretically means that nature will take its course and the child will develop its own

All language theorists acknowledge nature and nurture both play significant roles in children’s language development. However, the theoretical debate to whether nature or nurture is the dominant tool during a child’s language

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.

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.

Petitto & Marentette (1991) provides key evidence to suggest that ‘babbling’ is in fact a brain-based language capacity which enhances with maturity and not a speech-based phenomenon based on physical vocal maturation [1]. To reach this conclusion Petitto & Marentette (1991) conducted an experiment in which they analysed the vocal babbling of infants as well as the manual babbling of deaf infants [1]. The relevance of this decision is based on the fact, that sign language, like all other languages, is developed through language acquisition, thus if there is no correlation between manual babbling and vocal babbling, this would strength the stance that babbling is the product of physical maturation. The study, however, did conclude that manual

Despite having numerous species roaming the Earth, infants and young children are more fascinated with human speech. There are certain characteristics in human speech that distinguish it from any other species found in Earth. Previous studies performed by speech language pathologists show that infants and young children are particularly fond of familiar voices, and are easily able to respond more quickly to them as opposed to strangers. Whether the adults realize it or not, they speak to their children differently than to an adult. The intonation and rhythm in the adult’s voice are usually different around young children, causing the adults to be able to get the children’s attention. Over the years, speech language pathologists have conducted

The article “How do babies learn their mother tongue?”, written by Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, discusses the process in which babies learn a language. The authors cover the process with analogies and examples starting with a fetus in a womb, and ending with a 18-month-old watching television.

It is thought therefore, that the stimulation of adults and older children communicating with them, even though the baby cannot yet understand, it just as important as everything else done with them. Language is part of the everyday sounds that babies listen to, even though they may not participate, and songs can be a lovely and effective element of language that they are thought to enjoy. Around 1 year old they will start to attempt to speak, but often their pronunciation is unclearand the words are typically used singly, by themselve, rather than in sentences. In the 12 months following , they start bringing words together into short phrases and sentences, and as they use language more, their vocabularly rapidly increases. Concepts such as plurals and negatives come in the next 12 months, and sentences become better formed, although grammatical errors in speech are also likely, especially as English is a fairly 'irregular' language, so verbs such as eat become eaten, ad can be commonly mistaking by

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

Reduplicative set seems common when an infant starts learning a language. For most people, the first words that they learned are “mama” and “papa”. It is also a language development process for young children. They use reduplicative sets frequently in order to enable the child to produce polysyllabic utterances without articulating complex structures. Ingram argues that children produce those reduplicative sounds to compensate their inability to produce the whole word. So that when they develop the sophisticated sounding techniques, they would use “mommy” and “daddy” instead of “mama” and “papa”.

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

Language is a communicative system of words and symbols unique to humans. The origins of language are still a mystery as fossil remains cannot speak. However, the rudiments of language can be inferred through studying linguistic development in children and the cognitive and communicative abilities of primates as discussed by Bridgeman (2003). This essay illustrates the skills infants have that will eventually help them to acquire language. The topics covered are firstly, the biological aspects, the contribution of the human brain to language development? Secondly, key theories of language development will be considered. Is the development innate? Is there a critical period? Thirdly, what must be learned? What are the rudiments infants must

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).