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Language Acquisition in Early Childhood

 

At five years old, or thereabouts, a child has developed good control of elements of conversation.
             Prelinguistic speech involves a child making sounds that can be compared to syllables in common words. Babbling and cooing are the two types of prelinguistic speech. Babbling comprises of consonant-vowel sounds, such as "ta", "ba" and "da". Cooing is vowel sounds, like "uuhh". These sounds are strung together at around 9 - 11 months old, forming expressive jargon. This is an outpouring of chatter that has the intonation (pitch variation and rhythm) of actual speech. (For development of different sounds at different ages see Appendix One). .
             With the beginnings of linguistic speech, at around 12 months old, a child uses expressive jargon, with a small number of sounds that can be interpreted as words. These can include "mama", "dada" and "nana" (banana). These recognisable words are called holophrases.
             Children around 2 years of age communicate using telegraphic speech, language reduced to its most vital components, in the form of two or three word sentences. For example, "Look book", "Billy cry" and "Ball mine".
             With maturation, children" speech begins to sound more like that of adults. Sentences increase in length, and become more complex. Ultimately, everything once omitted in telegraphic speech, auxiliary verbs, verb endings, prepositions and pronouns, are included in the children's everyday language. By around age four or five, children typically have developed a control of oral language, vast experience with oral and written language and may be reading environmental print and learned to associate print with reading.
             PART 2.
             The role of the family is very important in supporting the language development of young children in the zero-to-five age group. The family's cultural background and communicative style can greatly influence a child's development of language.
             The language a child is exposed to for its early years is usually confined to its family members".


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