M3.1 Lesson 1 | HI-LING working page

Lesson 1: Language Acquisition from Birth to 1.5 Years Old

In this lesson, you will get to know the first steps of a baby's language learning and acquisition, when this process begins and what the typical stages are until the age of 1.5 years old.

Key Concepts

Prenatal Experience
Prelinguistic stage
Babbling
Phonetic Segment
Pre-Words

Unit 1: The First Sounds

The first step in language acquisition starts when the baby is still in the mother's uterus. At around the 4th month of pregnancy, the infant begins to recognise sound and can hear the surrounding voices. Babies, thus, are born with a perceptual system that is specially designed for listening to speech and is part of the so-called Language Acquisition Device (LAD). Newborns, for example, prefer to listen to their mother's voice, which is highly due to the timely, more prominent exposition of this voice and general prenatal experience. Interestingly, four days after birth, babies are already able to differentiate the sounds of their mother tongue and foreign languages.

After they are born, differences in the anatomy of the mouth (see below), compared to those of adults, hinder the babies' ability to produce normal speech sounds. In this prelinguistic stage, babies make noises such as crying, whimpering or cooing.

But at around month six, the baby starts to produce more distinctive sounds. They are able to consciously open and close their mouth as well as contract the tongue, which leads to the creation of sound. Being referred to as babbling, a baby can make sounds like “mama”, “aba”, or “dada” by simply reduplicating this very same structure again and again. Interestingly, babbling is universal, which means that all babies around the world, no matter in which culture or language they were born, produce the same babbling-sounds which are mostly vowels such as /b/, /m/, /d/, /k/ or /g/ combined with a consonant.

Soon, they start to try to match the sound patterns with their surrounding language and vary the intonation contours, as well as produce longer consonant-vowel strings. The structure changes from one to two-syllable sounds like “baba-dada” or “meme-dede”. After two to four months of babbling, the baby’s sound and intonation matches pretty well the language they were born in.

At the right you can see a comparison of the Infant's speech tract atonomy and of the Adult's speech tract atonomy

Activity 1

Discuss in pairs or small groups:

Have your parents or caregivers ever talked about your first word?

Do you know which one it was?

Do you have younger siblings or anything like that where you were able to observe the babbling or first-word speech phase? If so, how do you remember it?

Group Discussion

Unit 2: To the First Word

At the age of one year, babies start to shift from babbling to articulating their very first word. Current sociolinguists agree on the fact that there is a continuity from babbling to the expression of the first words - thus, babbling lays a fundamental first “trying out” and understanding of what later develops into proper words, phrases and sentences. Nonetheless, babbling does not seem to be crucial for the later development of real speech. Children who could not babble were still acquiring normal speech pronunciation later on.

The so-called pre-words or proto-words refer to the first use of consistent vocalizations in specific contexts. Such a meaningful vocalization is often combined with physical gestures or facial expressions. For example, vocalizing an initial /h-/ while reaching to a person might stand for “get something from someone”. To produce words, children need to be able to produce several or all of the so-called phonetic segments (single sounds). Their first words then often have the Consonant-Vowel (CV) structure, such as “hi” or “no”. Fundamentally different to the babbling stage is that here, meaning is attached to the uttered sound or word - sounds are consciously and purposefully chosen.

The babies then mostly start experimenting with the word structure, such as switching from CV to CVC to CV-CV and so on. In this stage, children generally develop different acquisition paths and are mostly also selective about which words they try to produce or avoid. Such selectiveness has its roots in the choice of sounds during the babbling stage.

Until they master the full range of articulatory programs necessary for the variety of word shapes in their language, children often fall short of adult pronunciations in their own production. Some sounds are omitted, and some sounds are substitutes or assimilated. For example, babies often replace stop-sounds with fricatives, as in the word ‘knife’ pronounced as : [nayb] (with a /b/ instead of a /f/).

You will get more information in the next session on how this early stage of word production then develops into the full language.

Activity 2: Individual

Assign the audios

Listen to the two following audios:

Try to assign the stages (red) to the audios (blue) by pulling the red sqare into the blue one and check answers afterwards.

Why did you assign the audio to the specific stage?

What did you notice?

Audio 1

Audio 2

Trivia

For babies, non-verbal communication is very important in language acquisition and development. Studies have shown that especially during Covid, when most adults had to wear face masks, babies may have lost some of their ability to read and interpret non-verbal communication and thus tend to have different language acquisition paths than those with regular access.

Final Thought

Babies learn enormously fast in their first months and years. Time must always be understood in relativity - whereas, to us, a month flies by, for a baby, it is much longer, and they acquire a lot of new words and linguistic forms during this period.

Literature

Eve V. Clark (2009). First Language Acquisition. London: Cambridge University Press.

Eve V. Clark & Marisa Casillas (2015). First language acquisition. Routledge.

William O’Grady (2005) How Children Learn Language. London: Cambridge University Press.