Describe the stages that infants and children go through as they learn language

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

ANSWER:
By about 2 months, infants begin cooing. Cooing involves making vowel sounds, such as “ooo” and “ah.” By 4 months, infants begin to engage in babbling, which adds consonant sounds to the vowel sounds they emitted during cooing. By 7 months, infants begin to emit babbles that contain sounds that are part of the language they have been exposed to in their environment. In this fashion, the infant’s language system apparently tunes itself to the language or languages that the infant hears on a regular basis. By 1 year, children’s babbling contains the sounds and intonations of their native language.
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Once a child achieves the stage of babbling the basic sounds, or phonemes, of her native tongue, the next step in language development is learning to communicate. At around 12 months, children begin trying to communicate in earnest with others. This communication is often based on gestures before it is based on words. For example, a child may point at a toy that he wants. When parents learn to interpret these preverbal gestures, communication is achieved. As they catch on to their child’s preverbal gestures, parents often verbalize the meaning of the gesture for the child. Parents say things like, “Oh, do you want this toy?” This verbalization of the child’s intention allows the child to begin to learn morphemes, or the smallest sounds in a language that have meaning. As a result, by the end of the first year or so, children begin to speak their first words.
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A child’s first words are usually the names of familiar objects, people, actions, or situations, ones with which they have had a great deal of contact. Typically, these words are Dada, Mama, hi, hot, and the like. Between 12 and 18 months of age, children usually utter only one word at a time, and often they convey tremendous meaning with these one-word sentences. For example, the utterance “Milk!” may stand for “I want some milk, please!”
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As young children begin to speak, they may exhibit overextension in their language, using one word to symbolize all manner of similar instances. For instance, the word dog may be used to symbolize any animal. During this period, the opposite problem may also occur when children exhibit underextension of language. In this situation, children inappropriately restrict their use of a word to a particular case, such as when a child uses the word dog to refer only to the family pet.
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By the time children reach 20–26 months, they begin to combine words into two-word sentences in what is called telegraphic speech. Telegraphic speech is often ungrammatical, but it does convey meaning, such as “Doggie bad,” meaning “The dog was bad.” From here, children rapidly acquire both vocabulary and grammar, or the rules that govern sentence structure in their language, such as word order and verb tenses. From the simple subject–verb combinations of telegraphic speech, English-speaking children progress to more complex subject–verb–object sentences between ages 2 and 3. Children who speak other languages adopt the relevant grammatical patterns of their native language. As children develop throughout the preschool years, their knowledge and use of grammar becomes increasingly complex. By age 6, the average child has an impressive vocabulary of around 10,000 words and a fairly competent mastery of grammar. As children develop better vocabularies and acquire the grammatical rules of language, they exercise these abilities during social interactions with others. It’s during these social interactions with peers and adults that children begin to learn pragmatics, or the rules of conversation operating in their culture. Pragmatics may include rules about turn taking, eye contact, tone of voice, and other aspects of conversation.