The use of language and speech as a window to the nature and structure of the human mind is called

psycholinguistics. Also, Psychology of language is a term used as a synonym for psycholinguistics. Psycholinguistics
has evolved into sub-fields: language's acquisition, production, comprehension and dissolution. Each of them
explains how language and speech are acquired, produced, comprehend and lost.
ACQUISITION
The main concern of acquisition is the ability of children to pick up their mother tongue so quickly and so easily.
Developmental psycholinguistics examines how speech emerges over time and how children go about constructing
the complex structures of their mother tongue.
NO LANGUAGE BUT A CRY
Crying is communicative and a direct precursor to language and speech. In the first few months, it is a language
without speech because the child communicates different types of discomfort without using words. As the infant
matures, crying helps the child learn how to produce linguistic sounds. During their first few weeks, crying is an
autonomic response to stimuli as a primary reflex created by the nervous system. Crying also trains babies to time
their breathing patterns so they learn how to play their lungs. This skill is crucial for successful speech
communication.
Crying initially is iconic; there is a direct and transparent link between the physical sound and its communicative
intent. For example, the hungrier a baby becomes, the louder and the longer the crying and it also increases in
pitch. In the first month or two, crying becomes more differentiated and more symbolic. The cries are indirectly and
randomly associated with its needs. At this stage, there is a significant transformation from using sound as an iconic,
direct reflection of an internal state to using it as a symbolic, indirect manifestation of complex internal feelings.
After several weeks of interaction with the caretaker, the child starts to coo, making soft gurgling sounds to
express satisfaction. Crying and cooing affect and are affected by caretaker behaviour. The early vocalizations of a
baby and the constant responses of the caretaker, mutually reinforce each other. This cooing stage emerges at
about two months of age but is succeeded when the child is about six months old, by a babbling stage. Babbling
refers when babies make sounds like ‘bababa’ or ‘mamama’ as a way of playing with their voices. They are
experimenting with different sounds and syllables.
Marginal babbling is an early stage similar to cooing where infants produce a few, and somewhat random,
consonants, and canonical babbling emerges at around eight months, when the child’s vocalizations are syllables
similar to those syllables of the language heard. Babbling is the first stage where we have strong evidence that
infants are influenced by the exposure to their mother tongue.
FIRST WORDS: HOLOPHRASTIC STAGE
At about one year old, children often use idiomorphs which are words they invent when they first catch on that
certain sounds have a unique reference. A survey show that children first learn to say words which refer to
prominent, everyday objects and usually things that can be manipulated by the child like mama, dada, doggie, kitty,
milk, cookie, sock. If the child cannot manipulate the object, it doesn't appear to be worth naming. At this stage we
can see evidence for what Piaget calls egocentric speech. That is, children are the centre of their universe. They
focus on their own thoughts, feelings and surroundings, without consider other’s perspectives.
The first cry, coo or babble is often ignored or unrecognized but they are the first evidence of vocabulary
acquisition. The first few words, whether idiomorphs or words from the native language, demonstrate that a child
has successfully made the transition from an iconic creature to a symbolic human being.
THE BIRTH OF GRAMMAR: PIVOT GRAMMAR
Children start to use single words as sentences expressing different statements, requests or exclamations. This use
of single words as skeletal sentences is referred to as the holophrastic stage. For example, use ‘Milk?’ instead of ‘Do
you have any milk?’ Or ‘Milk!’ instead of ‘I’d like some milk’. Holophrastic speech is the bridge which transports the
child from the cries, words and names across into phrases, clauses and sentences.
 Children progress through different stages of grammatical development, measured by the number of words
occurring per utterance. Individuals differ in the speed with which they move from one stage to another. All
children begin to create sentences after the holophrastic stage. First, children create sentences with two words.
When a two-word sequence is introduced, certain words called pivots like ‘it’ or ‘want’ tend to be used initially or
finally and other words can be used before or after these pivots. The word order used tends to follow the common
word order version used by their mother tongue. Subsequently, children add more words to their sentences. Even,
children demonstrate grammatical precocity, that is the ability to develop and use complex grammatical skills. It is
rare for them to repeat the same word twice in their sentences and they don’t randomly rotate words between first
and second position.
EVIDENCE FOR INNATENESS
Chomsky claims that humans born with a special ability to learn language which is different from learning other
skills like swimming or playing the piano. People learn those activities through practice and environment but
language is different. Chomsky believes that as humans have some kind of genetically determined ability to ‘learn’
to stand upright or to walk (sth people learn without thinking), they also possess an LAD, "Language Acquisition
Device" that helps them learn language naturally. It is better described as the innate mental mechanism designed
only for the acquisition of language. Now it is replaced with the more linguistically accurate Universal Grammar, an
abstract set of rules and principles which linguistics believe to be innately specified in all humans.
CHILDISH CREATIVITY
Despite the impact the environment has on the choice and direction of mother-tongue learning, children tend to
come up with all kinds of words and expressions which they have never heard in their environments. Children are
creative wordsmiths. From about two to four, children produce all kinds of expressions which they create in their
attempts to construct their mother tongue. This kind of tuning shows that the child has progressed to a more
advanced linguistic stage of language development. Overgeneralizations are very common in the mother-tongue
learning and are referred to as ‘false’ analogies.
A large subdiscipline of developmental psycholinguistics is the area of bilingualism and its branch devoted to
bilingual education. The emergence of ‘foreign accents’ in the speech of bilingual children at about the age of
twelve suggests that there exists a critical period for first language learning which is biologically determined. What
most typifies first language acquisition is the fact that it invariably occurs in stages. All children, no matter how rapid
or how pedestrian their rate of acquisition, proceed systematically through the same learning stages for any
particular linguistic structure.
Children who learn English produce two different types of WH questions before they eventually come up with the
correct adult version. Three distinct stages are identified: STAGE 1 → use of WH word but no auxiliary verb.
STAGE 2 → use of WH word and auxiliary verb after subject. STAGE 3 → use of WH word and auxiliary verb before
subject. No matter how precocious the children are, no matter how fast their rate of progress through these stages,
they don't skip over any of them; no child goes from stage 1 immediately to stage 3 without at least some examples
of stage 2 structures. Rates vary but stages don’t.
Another example of developmental stages is seen in the acquisition of English negatives. Brown divided their
grammatical development into periods of ‘mean Length of Utterances’ (MLUs), showing that as the children
progress in the acquisition of their mother tongue, their MLUs grow from two words to four. Even when children
aren't yet two years old and are just beginning to string two words together, they notice that words are not simply
piled on top of one another. This sensitivity to word choice and structure allows children to create grammatical
sentences. STAGE 1 → use of NO at the start of the sentence. STAGE 2 → use NO inside the sentence but no
auxiliary or BE verb. STAGE 3 → use NOT with appropriate abbreviation of auxiliary or BE.
There is a discovery that similar stages are found in adult second language learning. Like little children, adolescent
and adult foreign language learners also differ a great deal in their rate of language acquisition but not in the stages
through which they progress.