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02 Ages and Stages in First

Language Development
date @January 8, 2025

status Done

Pre-linguistic behaviours

Pre-lexical behaviours

Emerging grammar

Various View of Linguistic Development

Different authors describe the emergence of language differently

Partly where/how they observe

Partly theoretical bent and how they explain acquisition

‘Ages and stages’ as presented here is kind of an amalgam of different authors’ work

Eric Lenneberg (1967)

Early generative work

Lois Bloom (1975)

More known as a child communication person

Breyne A Moskowitz (1978)

Generative work as well

Lenneberg and Moskowitz focused more on stages

Bloom focused on linguistic milestones

Individual kid’s mileage may vary

There is no ‘typical’ kid

Individual milestone don’t correlate well with other milestones

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 If a child learns how to walk early, it doesn’t mean they’ll learn how to talk early as
goes with any other milestone.

These different milestones can occur at various points in their lives

Prelinguistic Behaviours
Cooing ( ~ 0-3 months) — neonatal infants typically don’t have much control of their
bodies

They may giggle or cry, or cough, or sneeze

What they don’t seem to do is make voluntary, intentional sounds

Cooing involves ‘natural’ noisesmade

They don’t have much control and so they don’t choose to do to make those noises

Gooing ( ~ 4-6 months) — infants start to make sounds voluntarily

Often non-repeated, of indeterminant length, not a lot of phonological structure; kid

‘plays’ with sound-making, exercising and practicing their vocal tract control

When kid exercise the noise making parts of their system and randomly start
making lengthy noises

Kid plays with combinations of vocal tract controls, airflow, larynx position, soft palate
position, etc.; begin to develop ‘awareness’ of how to make different sounds and how
these match the speech around them.

Plays a big role in speech and articulation

There are overlapping between the stages so it varies for each child as there is no ‘typical’
child.

Prelexical Behaviours
Babbling ( ~ 6-12 months) — voluntary, and apparently practiced and structured sounds,
but not necessarily communicative

Word structure starts to form in these stages.

Some authors divide babbling into two stages

Reduplicated babbling ( ~ 6-9 months)

1.02 Ages and Stages in First Language Development 2

 Often repetitive sequences of goo-ed syllables, often for long stretches

[ ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ]

Canonical babbling ( ~ 9-12 months)

Sound/syllable types begin to vary [ ba ba di bu da ga ba bi ]

Babble begins to form into word-sized units, 2-4 syllables

First repeated [ mama ] [ dada]

Syllable type begins to vary [ ba da ] [ gu di ]

Kid can produce their first words in this stage

Words they say can be just noises and have no meaning behind it based on context

A Little More About Babbling

Most authors just talk about ‘babbling’ rather than two separate (but overlapping) kinds of
babble

Some authors use ‘canonical’ to refer to the earlier, more reduplicated, stage with advanced
non-reduplicated (variegated) babble folded into an early-words stage

Lois Bloom identifies a first words milestone at arond 10 months

First words are typically (for English learners) one and two syllable babbles which take
on referential meaning.

First words tend to be limited to a smaller consonant and vowel inventory than the child
can produce (that is, the building blocks are a subset of the available possibilities)

First words represent a huge cognitive leap — things have names, and I can use names
to communicate (draw attention to, get information about, demand…)

Aside on Intonation and Prosody

Typically kids who reach canonical (variegated) babbling have also develop a degree of
prosody and intonation

Prosody typically has to do with ‘phrasing’ or chunking information

Intonation usually has to do with pitch as it get expressed over an utterance

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 Since these utterances aren’t quite linguistic or meaningful, this is difficult to describe
objectively, but…

Kids have developed intonational ‘tunes’ or ‘melodies’ that are (or mimic) common
intonational meanings, such as declarative, question, command, demand, etc.

Many kids seem to show ‘pragmatic’ understanding and usage much earlier, including
showing conversational turn-taking behaviour

*Kids fairly quickly develop a basic repertoire of that kind of decision

These ‘tunes’ have an extra layer of communicative signalling that help them get their
message through

It is reliable during the stage of first words

One-Word Stage (Holophrasis ~ 12-24 months)

Single words seem to take on the meaning of larger propositions, a holophrase (< Gk holo-
‘whole’ + phrasis ‘expression, phrase, sentence’)

‘Communicate with a single word something that might take an adult a whole sentence to
say’

Words not only name things, but have more complicated meanings/intentions (expressing
desire, denial, question, etc.)

‘Around’ 18 months, kids typically have around 50 (or let’s just ‘several dozen’) distinct,
stable words (i.e., words they can use and understand)

‘Around’ or after 18 months (they say), kids begin a vocabulary spurt; it took a year for kids
to get to around 50 words, they might double that in the next year or two.

About Early Vocabulary and Meaning to the Kid

Once a kid has clearly entered the holophrastic stage, and words become complexly
communicative (as opposed to just referential), some differenes have been reported

Stereotypically, we think of the early lexicon as being very contentful (nouns, adjectives,
verbs)

The vocabulary spurt is often accompanied by intense curiosity about things, and learning
their names attributes

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 Different kids seem to have different strategies, or approaches, to eliciting conversation from
adults, which may reflect slightly different ‘orientations’ to (early) language, or different
motivations in linguistic and cognitive development

‘Namey’ Kids vs. ‘Social’ Kids

One observation is that some kids are more interested in ‘names’

These kids seem to be concerned with learning the names of everything around them,
and more broadly how things around them are organized

A ‘namey’ kid might be very interested in names of animals, and kinds of animals
(mammals, reptiles, birds), and relationships among animals (bears, cubs; rams, ewes,
lambs)

They may be learning words to label and organize things in the world

They can organize through different things like colour, texture, etc.

Hellen Keller using word forms to understand a concept, like how she learned the word
water while having her hands under the water pump

Other kids are more social

These kids engage in more eye-contact

Their early words may include more interactive forms (e.g., ‘see?’ ‘up’)

These kids may be less interested in organizing the world and more in just having
interactions

Their goal isn’t to organize the word, but is it get more input and examples of what their
language looks like

These kids can relate to adults

Two-Word Stage ( ~ 24-30 months)

Bloom recognizes the emergence of two-word utterances, calling the first stage of this
combined single words, e.g., ‘doggy’ ‘bowl’, ‘mama’, ‘up’, where each word is separately
meaningful (i.e., no evidence of syntactic structure)

Eventually, true two-word utterances emerge; words have a meaning with respect to each
toher and have rules for combination (i.e., syntax)

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 In English, subjects precede verbs (’doggy bark’, ‘daddy fall’)

Verbs precede object (’drink juice’, ‘get crayon’)

Adjective-noun combinations are problematic, since English allows ‘(it’s a ) big dog’ and
‘(the) dog (is) big’

Telegraphic Stage
As kids begin to produce longer utterances, they’re still mostly limited to content words

Functional parts of sentences (pronouns, tense-aspect-mood markers, morphological

inflection, etc.) are absent

This is called ‘telegraphic’ because old telegrams used to be charged by the word; the result
was a ‘broken’ style characteristic of telegrams (watch some old westerns for example)

“Old uncle Griff passed away on Sunday, and left you about $200 and his collection of
Hummel figures”

UNCLE DEAD STOP LEFT MONEY AND DOLLS STOP

We stop counting words at this point

They keep it short and drop out words that aren’t critical like determinants

Telegraphic Stage Utterances

Telegraphic utterances lack all/most the little functional/inflectional parts of a typical
utterance (in English)

Pronouns, tense-mood-aspect morphology, ‘case’-y prepositions, plural marking, etc. are

absent

In heavy inflectional languages (e.g., Italian), words (even at earlier stages) may look
inflected (i.e., verbs, etc.) may have tense/agreement morphology

Longish words, but it’s not clear that they are meaningful

For kids at this stage, these are not ‘analyzable’ words with meaningful parts— most
words will have a typical or ‘neutral’ form (e.g., singular for nouns, third singular for
verbs) that the kid doesn’t treat (or recognize) as morphologically complex)

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 Telegraphic utterances are similar to headlines as they use words that are important to
get their message through

Eventually Kids Develop Grater Complexity

Auxiliary verbs appear, plurals and tense markers are used consistently

Sentenital negatives (not, -n’t) appear; weak prepositions, articles (determiners) appear

Simple variations on SVO word order (e.g., yes/no questions/subject/AUX inversion, wh-
fronting, etc.) appear

Some kids are able to produce passives (but some evidence suggests that passive processing
doesn’t fully develop until mid-primary school age

Can produce passives not in the same way adults do, under 3 and 4 years old

Similarly complex structures such as subordinating conjunctions, like if/then conditionals,

may be relatively late developing

Phrases conjunctions, things that combines more than one clauses are beginning to form
at around 4-6 years of age

Not clear if this involves later grammatical development or later cognitive development

Is Language-Learning Innate?
Biologists describe some behaviours as “instinctive”

Instinctive behaviour are automatic; they don’t need to be taught, so much as they
emerge on some kind of biological schedule

Things like breathing, swallowing, etc. are inborn and innate

Innate — Instinctive behaviours that emerges on it’s own in some biological schedule; they
are part of our genetic evolutionary shaping

It may emerge at birth or later but it will emerge on its own in our development

Innate behaviours share some basic qualities

They cannot be directly taught

They emerge (sometimes with demonstration) on a biological schedule

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 They are subject to a critical period; if the behaviour does not appear, or if something
else interferes with the emergence of the behaviour, then past the critical period, the
(typical) behaviour does not emerge

Kids cooing is impossible to stop them from doing

The kids body is ready to do it and not because they choose to do it

Deaf babies go through these stages as well

Around reduplicated words stage and first words stage, things fall out but they still
practice making noises even without being able to hear anything

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