Language Development in Early Childhood

                            Table of Contents

                                   Introduction……………………………………………….2

                                   What is Language Development?.......................................3

                                   When exactly takes place?..................................................3

                                   What is The Telegraphic Stage?.........................................4

                                   What is the essence of The Telegraphic Stage?..................5

                                   During the age of Three…………………………………..5

                                   During the age of Four……………………………………6

                                   Conclusion………………………………………………...8

Sebastián González.

Teresa Martínez.

Whole Language 1.

02/07/2015

The 3rd & 4 rd  Early Stages in Language Development

Introduction

Language is what allows any kind of societies around this vast world work well. Through language, what our senses perceive from our surroundings can be described. When communicating through language, rarely do us think about the great importance it has in our daily lives. It seems that language controls us, in a sense. We are attached to it. When we first begin to acquire it as children, we are not yet able to understand the magnitude language will have in our later life as adults.

There are countless researches and investigations made that have proved that language development takes place before a child is even born. As a fetus, inside our mother’s womb, we first develop by hearing our mother’s voice. When the child is born he begins to listen and take close attention to the speech of those that are close to him, and get scared or cry if they happen to listen an unexpected noise.

In most cases, children’s language development seems to follow a predictable order. Nevertheless, there is also seemed to be a great amount of variation in the age at which kids reaches a given milestone. In addition, each child’s language development can be measured by the acquisition of particular skills.

What is Language Development?

“Language development is the process by which children come to understand and communicate language during early childhood.”(Language Development, http://www.healthofchildren.com/)

When children are born and until they reach the age of five, they tend to develop their mother tongue at a very fast speed. The language learning process goes through several stages and these stages are also known as universal because they are seemed in every human. But as we know every human, in this case children are different and the age and the speed can vary among children when it comes to reach each milestone in the development of a language. As a result the language development of children must be compared with rules, instead of comparing it with other children’s development.

The ones who generally develop language at a very fast pace are seemed to be the girls. The development of a language implies processes and systems that mirror the evolution and progress of a children’s brain. There is critical period when for a children to develop language become more and more hard to achieve.

When exactly takes place?

Kathleen Wermke - a PhD in the field of behavioral physiology of the University of Würzburg in Germany- in cooperation with her research team have made incredible breakthrough, they have found out that children language development begins at the mother’s womb, as fetuses when our mother is speaking we are able recognize the speech and tone of voice from our mothers. And before birth, by the age of four months, toddlers have developed the ability to distinguish sounds from their surroundings and able to read the lips of the ones that are speaking to them.

Wermke states that the sounds and noises from the outside world can be identified and memorized by human fetuses at the last trimester of the mother’s pregnancy stage, with a peculiar predisposition to melody found in some types of music and language speech. In contrast to other voices, babies tend to take close attention to their mother’s voice and because of the constant exposure to the maternal speech or “motherese” they gradually begin to notice the emotional content in every message by paying attention to the intonation.

Wermke’s team during an experiment recorded and also analyzed the cries of 60 babies, half of the babies were from families having French as their mother tongue and the other half from families having the German language as their mother tongue: “The dramatic finding of this study is that not only are human neonates are capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical from the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester of gestation” (Kathleen Wermke 2009.)

What is The Telegraphic Stage?

Is one of the last periods of a language development which comes before the later multi-word stage(the last stage), the telegraphic stage begins around the ages of two to three years and goes until the age five. During this stage children have acquired most of the content; function words used in a language and begin to use multiple-word utterances: “At about the age of two, children first begin to use grammatical elements. In English, this includes finite auxiliaries ("is", "was"), verbal tense and agreement affixes ("-ed" and '-s'), nominative pronouns ("I", "she"), prepositions ("that", "where"), and determiners ("the", "a"). The process is usually a somewhat gradual one, in which the more telegraphic patterns alternate with adult or adult-like forms.” ( Kamalani Hurley, Pat. “Module 5 Lesson 5.3 First Language Acquisition”)