Language development begins from the very first day after birth. During toddlerhood, young children confront language explosion that enables easy acquisition and development of their first language. Research indicates that even during the last few months of pregnancy, babies listen to their mother’s voice.

Developmental psycholinguistics in children.

Young children’s abilities to understand, process, and produce language are always impressive. During their early childhood, babies reach cognitive developmental milestones in their learning process of memory, language, thinking, and reasoning. As infants grow physically and psychologically, they are able to reach out and explore the world around them in an outstanding way and in greater depth. In year one, for example, babies learn to focus their vision and attention, and mainly learn from things that they see and hear. With this in mind, parents play a vital role in contributing to early children language acquisition and development.

Language acquisition is the process by which language develops in humans. There are two kinds of language acquisition in developmental psycholinguistics: the first language acquisition which refers to the development of language in children; and the second language acquisition once they become adults.

Children’s construction of language emerges from interaction and/or their understanding of communication prior to the language itself, known as “speech”. Toddlers listen carefully to their parents and try to imitate them. They first acquire the sound system of their parents’ utterance –their mother tongue – independently of meaning. Then, they merge it with communicative gestures to eventually form productive speech.

Stages of child language development.

There are four important stages of first language development: the pre-speech stage for first-born babies to 6 months; the babbling stage for infants from 6 to 8 months; the holophrastic stage or the use of a single word when the baby reached the age of 9 to 18 months; and the telegraphic stage – the use of combined words – for 18 – 36 month-children.

Between 2 and 5, young children discover new vocabularies, and they start to expand and refine their ability to use and pronounce different words. Researchers point out that children normally experience a language explosion between the ages of 3 and 6. At age 3, their spoken language consists of roughly 900 words. By age 6, their spoken vocabularies expand between around 8,000 and 14,000 words. Beyond 6 years old, their language use becomes more mature and complicated, as they reach school-age and interact with different persons beside their parents.

Each child has their own way of acquiring language depending on their cognitive and psycholinguistic growth. They learn at their own pace as well. Kids who struggle with language acquisition experience delays in the language learning process whereas other children may develop it quickly and more easily.

Sources: Linguistic Society of America / English finders / gracepoint/ SlideToDoc.