Thinking — Psychology STD 11 Humanities — Question

Human language is more complex, creative and spontaneous than the system of communication other animals can learn. There is great deal of regularity with which children all over the world seem to be learning the language or languages. There is a predictable pattern in which children proceed from almost no use of language to the point of becoming competent language users.The stages of language development are:

1. New born babies and young infants make variety of sounds which gradually get modified to resemble word.

• First sound produced by babies is crying. It is undifferentiated and similar across various situations.
• Gradually pitch and intensity changes to signify states such as hunger, pain, sleepiness etc.
• These differentiated crying sounds meaningful cooing sounds like 'aaa' 'uuu' etc.

2. At around six months of age, children enter babbling phase involving repetition of variety of consonant and vowel sounds.
3. By about nine months of age, these sounds get elaborated to strings to some sound combinations such as (dadadada) into repetitive patterns. This later babbling seems to be imitative.
4. Around the first birthday most children enter one word stage.

• First word usually contains one syllable (e.g. ma order).
• Then they move to one or more words which are combined to gradually become more
• Form sentences. So they are called holophrases.

5. Around 18-20 months of age children enter two word stage. It exemplifies telegraphic speech and contains mostly nouns and verbs.

• Close to their third birthday i.e. two and a half years children's language development gets focused on rules of language they hear. This stage is called syntactic development.