First Language Acquisition

All normal infants, no matter their cultural differences, develop language at roughly the same time, but they progress at different rates. Although this biological schedule is tied very much to the maturation of the child’s brain and the lateralization process, we can not forget the diverse social factors in the infant’s environment.

But, in order to be clear and not to get lost with too many details, when considering a “normal” child, several stages have been established, which are the following ones:

STAGE	CHARACTERISTICS
Cooing (about 0 – 3 months) Prelinguistic stage	Gurgling moves on to vocalisation involving sounds which resemble vowels. The first recognizable sounds are velar consonants (such as /k/ and /g/) as well as higher vowels (such as /i/ and /u/. The child responds vocally to human speech.
Babbling (from 0 – 6 months) Prelinguistic stage	The infant produces consonant vowel sequences which can resemble those of the L1. The child’s later productions become imitative.
Echolalia (from 0 – 8 months)	The child imitates adult intonation patterns with some degree of accuracy.
One-word or Holophrastic Stage (from 1 year – onwards)	Holphrastic means a single form functioning as a phrase or sentence. Therefore, from the twelve months, the child begins to produce a variety of recognizable single unit utterances. While most of these single forms are used for naming objects, they can suggest the child is already extending their use. Moreover, the infant can have a vocabulary of around fifty words, usually nouns, and he/she is able to recognize the referential function of words.
Two-word Stage (from 18 months – onwards)	The infant’s vocabulary moves beyond fifty words. But the most significant consequence is that the child not only produces speech, but receives feedback. Some “mini-sentences” with simple semantic relationships are produced by the child.
Telegraphic Stage (from 2 years – onwards)	Telegraphic speech refers to the absence of most function words. Moreover, the two-word combinations exhibit a set of primitive semantic relationships of which the earliest are usually naming (this), recurrence (more) and non-existence (no). At about the same time, the vocabulary burst begins (that is a sudden rapid increase in the vocabulary produced by the child), with an increase of about six to ten words a day. He/she has developed some sentence-building capacity and the pronunciation has become closer to the form of the adult language.
Multi-word Stage (from 3 years – onwards)	The infant uses strings of three or more words, often based upon established two-word patterns. The adult syntactic patterns gradually become more prevalent.

Infant’s Language Acquisition Conclusions

Children actually are not “taught” language, but they actively construct, from what is said to them, possible ways of using the language. Then, the child’s linguistic production is mostly trying out constructions and testing if they work or not. That is why adult correction does not seem to be a very effective determiner of how the child speaks. However, one factor that seems to be extremely relevant in the child’s acquisition process is the actual use of sounds and word combinations, either in interaction with others or in word-play, alone.

Finally, it is usually assumed that, by the age of five, the infant has completed the greater part of the basic language acquisition process. According to some authors, the child is then in a good position to start learning a second or foreign language.