Today we will take a trip through the child language development. Will you accompany me?
Language development in babies from 0 to 1 year:
From the moment children are born they are receptive to all sounds in the environment. Already from the tummy they can hear them, although muffled by the amniotic fluid and mixed with the sound of their mother’s heart. The ear is completely formed and operational from week 28 onwards.
We can establish 4 stages in language development During the first year:
0-2 months: reflex cry and vegetative sounds.
A baby’s first sounds are cries. Although they may serve as communication during the first months, they are only reflex signs of discomfort.
Some sounds are vegetative, belching, coughing and sneezing, which help keep the air passages open.
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2-4 months: laughter and sounds of joy.
Joyful sounds usually appear during social interaction, as babies look at their parents’ smiles or listen to them sing or talk. These pleasant sounds, which can also be heard when they have eaten, looked at or picked up an object, are produced in the back of the mouth.
Babies cry less at this stage because they have additional ways to express themselves. They also explode in laughter sustained when they love something.
After one or two weeks of smiling at you, the child may begin to produce his first vowel sounds.
4-6 months: vocal play.
This is a transitional stage between sounds of joy and actual babbling. As the shape and size of the oral cavity changes and maturation in the brain progresses, the baby’s noises change from a “guu” or “coo” gurgling to single syllables and different like “da” or “ba”. The baby produces these sounds while she explores and plans the possibilities of the tract. The first syllables to pronounce will be those that are produced with the front part of the mouth (pa, ma, ba, da, ta) that will arise when the air separates your lips. During this period babies use cries to communicate and when they start to cry, they often look at their caregivers.
6-12 months: babbling reduplicated.
They begin to babble, producing strings of vowels and consonants, such as “tatata.” These sequences of sounds give the impression that the baby is saying something.syllable chain and indicate a great improvement in the muscles that govern speech.
Towards the end of this period, babies combine their cries with gestures, pointing or trying to reach the person who cares for them. You should never underestimate the importance of non-verbal communication. When the child still does not know how to utter words, he will use gestures, pointing… as a form of communication and we must reinforce his efforts to make himself understood, as he progresses in the development of language, so that he is able to express himself verbally, these gestures will disappear.
Language development of the child from 1 to 2 years old.
12-18 months: Non-reduplicated babbling, expressive slang and first words.
Non-reduplicated babbling and expressive slang.
As babies approach the end of their first year, changes in babbling begin again. The syllable chains can alternate consonants and vary in emphasis and intonation. This expressive jerja It imitates adult language, producing long and complex sequences of meaningless sounds and following the modulation of the adults’ sentences. These sequences often appear in situations where language is appropriate and when the child “talks” into a toy telephone or “reads” a picture book. The period of expressive slang often overlaps with the production of the child’s first real words.
First words.
When a baby goes from babbling to saying words, something very important has happened. Instead of simply playing with sound, the baby is planning controlled speech.
First words tend to be monosyllables “ma” or syllable duplicates “mama”, consist of a consonant followed by a vowel, and generally contain consonants that are produced at the front of the mouth, such as b, p, d or m. These sounds are the ones that come easiest to the baby, no matter what the baby’s native language is.
These first words may not be recognized as such; babies often copy animal sounds, pick up sounds from the environment, or make up words. They may also omit the initial consonant or syllable, or the last one.
The way children pronounce their first words varies widely. Each child will use those words whose sounds or syllables he can produce easily.
During this stage the process of acquiring new words is very slow.
And what do those first words mean?
During the one-word stage, your single expressions have to fulfill the functions of an entire sentence. Because babies want to say more than they say with a single word, their unique utterances are called holophrases.
After children have learned a word, they can extend its meaning to designate objects or situations that are in some way similar to the original label; this process is called overextension of words and we can observe it when a child calls all his caregivers mom, which does not mean that he does not know who his real mom is, but that he simply does not know any more words to call the people who take care of him. Or when they call all four-legged animals “guagua” or “ball” to everything that is round.
18-24 months: The explosion of vocabulary.
After a slow start, when each new word is a feat of memory, the child begins the exploration of names. From then on, children acquire new words at a prodigious speed, although individual differences are extraordinarily wide. These differences appear to be related to the amount of time parents spend talking to their children.
At first, girls master the words before boys, even when both are given the same conversation time. Gender differences begin to reduce at 20 months and disappear by the third year.
Language development of the child from 2 to 3 years:
24-30 months: my first sentences.
Around 24 months, children begin to use expressions made up of several words, at first they say them as if they were a single word: “sehacaido”, “seharoto”…
Little by little they will begin to put together two words to express their needs: “baby chair”, “mom here”… These small compositions resemble the phrases in telegrams, stripped of everything until only the essential remains. That’s why psychologists call two-word expressions telegraphic speech. At this stage the words that children choose are words with content, full of information.
30-36 months: lengthening the sentences.
When children reach the age of two and a half, they can already construct sentences that become increasingly closer to those of adults.
And several phenomena occur that greatly worry parents; theoverregularization, evolutionary dyslalia and, above all, the evolutionary stuttering. None of them should be a cause for concern.
Suddenly, children realize that there are rules in the language we use, and they begin to use them. We realize that this is happening when they apply that rule to irregular verbs. The overregularization We see it clearly when a child who, at 24 months old, said “broken,” at 30 begins to say “broken.” Isn’t that something extraordinary?
We call developmental dyslalia to this phase of language in which children substitute or distort some phonemes. The most difficult to articulate in the Spanish language is the “rr” and many of them will still take another year to master it.
He developmental stuttering It occurs when the child can already express himself through language with some ease; He makes long sentences (5 or 6 words) and can tell us about his experiences, bringing what he has experienced in the past to the present through verbal communication. But they want to do it very quickly, a little anxiety occurs, their speech apparatus is still being perfected, which gives rise to that blockage in the language that we call stuttering, consisting of repeating the same syllable or word several times. We say that it is evolutionary because it is part of the normal process of language development and will disappear without the need for professional help. Parental guidance is to wait patiently for the sentence to finish. Keep in mind that it happens because he is nervous, so he needs us to reassure him. If he gets very frustrated we should explain to him that this is normal, that it happens to all children and that as he gets older it will disappear.
It is amazing that in such a short period of time a child accomplishes the feat of mastering the language. This fact will mark a milestone in his development, since it will change not only the way in which he relates to others, but also the way he uses to relate to himself: his thinking.
We invite you to visit María Isabel Rojas’s blog where you will find more articles on child psychology.