Around the time a child is 18 months they will start putting together words that form basic sentences in order to communicate their wants and needs. They start to put into use all the language skills they had absorbed up to that point and by the time they are two most children are avid language users. When broken down, there are many different parts of a language. Language, put into categories, has five main aspects; phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Each of these things, as well as visual cues and modeling, play a part in how an infant develops language. .
Phonology refers to the sounds that a language makes, the sounds individual letters make and the sounds groups of letters make are all part of phonetics. Each language has its own set of phonemes, the smallest sound unit in a language, that an infant will learn to distinguish between. In fact, months before an infant speaks their first words, they acquire an extensive and detailed knowledge about the sound patterns of their prime/native language (Saffran & Thiessen, 2003). Research shows that "infant's speech perception is highly advanced" and that "infants can perceive almost all of the speech-sound contrasts used in language, either at birth or within the first few weeks of life" (Matlin, 2013). Infants do three major things when they are learning sounds. First, they have to be able to distinguish sounds. Second, they have to be able to group together sounds that are phonetically equivalent and recognize that they are not the same, like the sound b makes and the sound p makes (Matlin, 2013). Third, they have to be able to recognize that the pitch of voice does not change the sound made. Infants start to play with these sounds and practice making them when they babble. Eventually their babbling moves from phonology to morphology. .
Morphology deals with morphemes, the smallest units of meaning within a language (i.
