ACADEMIC YEAR 2013-2014
YEAR ONE: INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING
#2: THE STAGES OF FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
(extracted from: Majer, J. 2010.  First language acquisition . In Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B. (Ed.), New
Ways to Language. A
ódz
: A
ódz
University Press. 317-334)
FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION is a unique process in human development. Although little children are not
taught language formally, they manage to grasp its complexity both rapidly and effortlessly. Past two years
of age they start to pick up language with such ease that at six they are already competent users of a system
that is clearly their own, and not just a fragmented reflection of the adult version. What is more,
simultaneous acquisition of two or even more languages can be equally successful, provided that the child
grows up in a rich and stimulating linguistic environment, involving frequent conversations with parents and
older siblings who encourage the child to express his or her needs, interests, ideas and feelings. Whether
such interactions are monolingual or bilingual, they first and foremost enrich the child cognitively. After all,
there is more to language acquisition than mastering the phonology, syntax and vocabulary of the system(s)
functioning in the family. In actual fact, the growth of linguistic competence is part of children s overall
physical, social and cognitive development in which the language acquisition process is fully integrated with
the daily routines at home and in the wider speech community. As pointed out by Wells (1999: 248),  there is
no clear separation between learning language and using language to learn about the world .
1. Stages in first language acquisition
Language acquisition tends to follow a predictable sequence of steps defined chronologically which reflect a
genetic timetable as well as a strong relation to other aspects of human behaviour. The whole process can be
roughly divided into the pre-linguistic phase and the linguistic phase, each comprising a few stages, though
the rate of progression or the precise age at which a given stage occurs may vary from infant to infant.
Therefore, the account of the emergence of speech in little children presented below should be treated as a
continuum, more than degrees with clearly defined boundaries. Besides, most language acquisition scenarios
described in the literature relate consecutive achievements mainly in the productive aspects, even though
progression in the domain of receptive skills seems no less important. For this reason, in the present synopsis
some emphasis is also placed on perception.
1.1.Pre-linguistic stages of L1 acquisition
Theoretically, pre-linguistic development of language acquisition begins at birth. However, typical early
vocalizations heard in the first eight weeks of life are mainly manifestations of discomfort (e.g. feeling
hungry or being wet) or sounds accompanying physiological actions such as sucking or swallowing. It is not
until the third month that we can speak of the onset of the stage known as COOING, called so for the
occurrence of gurgling sounds  vocalic in nature and varying in pitch. These coincide with the appearance
of comfort sounds such as sighs or grunts in interactions with caregivers, though laughter may not occur until
around sixteen weeks. At the same time, perception is also developing. Early ability to distinguish between
speech and non-speech is soon extended to include not only sensitiveness to the sound of the language being
acquired as opposed to other systems, but also to contrasts between individual speech sounds, such as [t] vs.
[d].
Later, in more or less the twentieth week of age, the vowel-like cooing begins to be interspersed with
sounds which are consonantal in character, particularly involving labial fricatives and nasals. In the period
that follows, i.e. between the fourth and the seventh month of life, babies get even more familiarized with the
sound of their voice and they can now be said to experiment with their speech organs, trying out both pitch
and volume modulations, as well as producing more complex articulations, such as closures, frictions and
nasal murmurs. While infants are getting fully in charge of their voice, their articulatory apparatuses are
already preparing for a more advanced step in the development of speech, that is one marked by the
production of syllable-like strings.
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The next stage in the process is referred to as BABBLING. Appearing at around six to eight months of life,
this pre-linguistic step en route to language acquisition enables babies to experiment more freely with speech
sounds. Accordingly, progress in phonological development is marked by rhythmical articulations made by
alternate closures and openings of the jaws and lips. This results in the production of whole series of
identical syllables of the CV pattern, e.g. ba-ba-ba, na-na-na, dee-dee-dee, initially with a preference for
voiced stops and low vowels but with a dispreference for affricates, fricatives or liquids and consonant
clusters in the syllable onset. Later the reduplicated babbling of the identical CV sequence is typically
interchanged with variegated babbling, which involves different CV sequences, e.g. ba-mi-do.
As observed by Pinker (1994), the babbling sounds  are the same in all languages, and consist of the
phonemes and syllable patterns that are most common across languages (p. 265). It is at the babbling stage
 despite its physiological universality, which applies to hearing and deaf children alike (Stoel-Gammon
1999: 105)  that the specificity of a given phonological system begins to assume shape. Still, such an early
inventory can be indiscriminate. In other words, it may include sounds that are not part of the phonology of
the language to which the baby is exposed, e.g. clicks. Further on the range of articulations becomes more
complex and it includes other types of sounds as well as different forms of syllables, i.e. CVC and VC (e.g.
bab-bab, ab-ab). In late babbling, i.e. from about eight months onwards, there is often a phase called
ECHOLALIA, in which the infant imitates adult intonation patterns with some degree of accuracy.
However, what makes babbling still resemble the vocal play of the preceding stage is that these syllable-
like sequences can be produced for sheer pleasure when babies are alone, and not only for the purpose of
social communication with caregivers. On the other hand, the role of interaction in the entire process of
language acquisition is crucial. Besides providing affect and maintaining contact, it consolidates perceptive
abilities long before the infant is ready to engage in linguistic production. In fact, a baby of six to nine
months learns to associate certain utterances by the caregivers with situational routines in which these are
used. Apart from that, as observed by Marchman (1997: 295), at around the eighth month of life there
appears the ability to distinguish between words that have been heard by the child before and words which
are completely new in the caregivers INPUT. These changes in speech perception pave the way for
comprehending the meaning of the first few words.
Summing up the accomplishments of the pre-linguistic development, it has to be pointed out that we
cannot as yet speak of the formation of a language system. On the other hand, the very fact that in less than a
year infants move first from distinguishing speech from other noise to noticing its rhythmic and intonational
patterns, and later from exploiting the potential of their own vocal organs to linking utterances with the
situational context, signifies remarkable progress. All these steps are indispensable for linguistic competence
to emerge in humans who naturally learn to perceive and comprehend speech before they are able to produce
any.
1.2 Linguistic stages of L1 acquisition
At around nine to ten months of age late babblings begin to stabilize in the form of proto-words (Vihman et
al. 2009) when they are consistently used with reference to a particular person, object, purpose or emotional
state. Thus, expressions like nana or dada can be associated with contents such as  I want something and  I
don t want something . This marks the start of the so-called ONE-WORD STAGE, also known as
HOLOPHRASTIC SPEECH. Here single open-class words or word stems stand for whole utterances which
represent exclamations, requests or demands. Because of ambiguity and a low level of redundancy such
messages may not always be easy to decode. But whatever problems caregivers might experience trying to
interpret the meaning of proto-words, the occurrence of such forms does signify a transition from the pre-
linguistic to the linguistic phase of first language acquisition.
A significant phonological feature of the period of single-word utterances is the production of actual
speech sounds in what are now regular pronunciation patterns, albeit with characteristic substitution of
certain segments by others, e.g. [r] by [w] or [¸] by [f]. Besides, research on speech perception shows that
children are aware of many phonemic contrasts existing in the system being acquired, even though they may
not be able to articulate all of them.
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At this point, it is also in order to mention the phenomenon of prosodic BOOTSTRAPPING. The metaphor,
first used in computer science but originally deriving from the story of Baron von Münchhausen, who
allegedly evaded drowning in a swamp by lifting himself up by his own bootstraps, already operates on units
larger than the word, i.e. going beyond the current stage of L1 acquisition. Infants learn to recognize the
patterns regularly occurring in the input directed at them, such as pauses, phrase boundaries or intonation
contours, particularly the placement of tonic stress, well before lexical knowledge becomes accessible
(Crystal 2008: 58). According to Gerken (1994), a child acquiring English apparently first builds a metrical
template which corresponds to that language s tendency towards a strong-weak rhythmic pattern. The
template then encourages the child to watch out for words in the input which follow the same prosodic
structure. This finding, in turn, suggests a working hypothesis that a stressed syllable in adult speech is likely
to mark a word onset, which might account for the occurrence of such clipped versions of target words as
raffe (< giRAFFE) or nana (< baNAna; Field 2004: 38).
Where lexical competence of the holophrastic stage is concerned, word meaning can typically be
broadened or narrowed in ways that do not reflect adult linguistic competence. For example, while doggie
might mean  any four-legged creature (OVER-EXTENSION), at the same time kitty might refer specifically to
 the family pet kitty , and not to other cats (UNDER-EXTENSION). Moreover, whereas the passive vocabulary
of one-year-olds amounts to ca. 20 words, observational data such as production diaries kept by parents
indicate that throughout much of the holophrastic stage children understand many more lexical items than
they are actually able to use as their active lexicon. Later on, e.g. at 18 months, an average child may have a
productive vocabulary of around 40-50 single-morpheme words (Ingram 1989: 340). However, by and large,
in the first half of the second year of life the rate of word acquisition is still relatively slow, being confined to
one to three lexical items per week. In comparison, from the third year on children can pick up an average of
10 words a day.
The next step in the linguistic development of speech is called the TWO-WORD STAGE. Beginning
typically between the eighteenth and the twenty-fourth month of age, it marks the start of genuine
communication and is characterized by the occurrence of short utterances made up of two morphemes linked
in simple semantic relations, such as mail come or doggie bark. Strictly speaking, these early word
combinations should be considered ungrammatical from the point of view of adult native-speaker
competence, yet they are hardly ever  corrected by caregivers. On the contrary, as acts of communication
they are highly welcome in this child grammar form. And as signs of the emergence of syntax they show that
outstanding progress has been made in the acquisition process.
Two-word structures are binary syntactic-semantic relations made up of items selected from a small class
of operators  at one time called  pivot-words  as well as from a larger, open class of words. For this
reason, it was customary especially in the 1960s and 1970s (cf. Braine 1963; Bloom 1972; Slobin 1973) to
refer to the system underlying the two-word stage as PIVOT GRAMMAR, though combinations involving no
functional pivot-words, i.e. only content words from the open class, are also possible. In fact, many of the
open-class lexical items are those already present at the one-word stage. Examples: allgone milk, no cookie,
bye-bye car.
Pinker (1994) observes that two-word utterances  are so similar in meaning the world over that they read
as translations of one another (p. 268). In any case, two units at a time suffice to represent two-year-olds
grammar. At that stage, even if children are heard to utter more complex structures such as formulaic
expressions which they might have picked up from their caregivers or older siblings, it does not necessarily
mean that those were generated by the evolving grammatical competence. Furthermore, if asked to repeat
whole sentences, infants will typically leave out grammatical morphemes: auxiliaries, complementizers,
determiners, even pronouns, as these are not yet represented in the system which develops at the two-word
stage. Nevertheless, at that stage production competence does not have to reflect perception competence. It
appears that the very same children who fail to provide functional elements in their output still expect them
in the input directed at them by caregivers. In other words, they experience comprehension difficulties if
certain grammatical morphemes are purposefully omitted by adults.
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As regards lexical competence, the size of active vocabulary at the onset of the stage in question ranges
from ca. 50 to 200 words, which, apart from greetings and names of people significant for the child, are
mostly concrete nouns and verbs. Essentially, these lexical items reflect personal desires, as well as daily
routines such as being fed or bathed. As for more abstract words like adjectives, those will be acquired later.
Rather than speak of the three- or four-word stage as further steps in the development of linguistic
competence, researchers prefer to distinguish TELEGRAPHIC SPEECH or the EARLY MULTI-WORD STAGE,
which the average child enters at an age between 24 and 30 months. In that period of L1 acquisition, children
are already capable of generating longer and more complex syntactic strings involving Subject + Verb +
Object relations. Thus, a pair of two-word units can be combined so that one is embedded in the other, e.g.
Make cookie and No cookie can produce Make no cookie. Similarly, utterances such as Mommy make and
Make cookie can be conjoined to yield Mommy make cookie. The occurrence of those and other phrase
structures, for example patterns such as That John car (Subject + Subject Complement) or What that egg
doing? (Wh + Subject + Verb Phrase), marks significant progress in the process of language acquisition.
Despite being incorrect, utterances of this kind do display grammatical word order and therefore attest to an
understanding of English sentence structure.
Two-year-old speakers are able to use not only personal pronouns (I, he) or finite forms of the verb to be
(is, was), but also tense suffixes (-s, -ed) and even determiners (the, a). Moreover, telegraphic structures
from the earlier stage now tend to co-occur with forms which already conform to adult grammar, as speech
includes more and more of the functional elements which previously were characteristically left out. Later
on, from roughly 3 years, children start to form longer sentences as their grammar now enables them to
produce multiple clauses. From coordination involving the conjunction and, such as in How tiger be so
healthy and fly like kite? (Pinker 1994: 270), transition is soon made to subordination, as in What did you
give to her when her been flu? (Finegan 1994: 454). Besides, children gradually grasp major syntactic and
morphological rules, e.g. interrogation, negation, passivization or plural formation. Even artificially created
nouns such as wug have been shown to receive the accurate plural ending (i.e. wugs) in the performance of
most four- to five-year-olds tested for that purpose (Berko 1958). Still, other rules may have to take longer to
be systematically acquired. For example, as reported by Ingram (1989: 483), children under 5 years still have
an underdeveloped comprehension of relativization, which also causes that spontaneous output at that age
contains few instances of relative clauses.
However, the acquisition of major rules passes through a few interesting stages. Thus, in the pre-
systematic period, when the child is not yet aware of the rule, regular and irregular verbs or nouns tend to be
used correctly. Accordingly, forms such as bring and mouse might occur alongside their irregular
counterparts brought and mice, respectively, and they may not seem affected negatively by the regularity of
inflections such as bang ~ banged or box ~ boxes. However, once the child  has discovered how to form
the regular preterite/plural and has entered the systematic period of rule acquisition, inflections are
overgeneralized, and so logical though incorrect forms might appear, e.g. bringed or mouses. For the same
reason, tense may be doubly marked, as in didn t found or doesn t wants. This pattern of U-SHAPED
DEVELOPMENT provides significant proof that children  do not simply parrot the words of adults but are
actively engaged in a process of rule formulation and adjustment (Field 2004: 198).
Paradoxically then, there may be less grammatical accuracy at that stage than during the earlier period of
development when then child still used irregular preterit forms with past meanings and irregular plural forms
with plural meanings. Finally, in the post-systematic period, irregularities and exceptions are accepted,
though output may still include forms such as brang, broughted or mices (as well as broked, broking, wented,
wenting, or thoughted; cf. Clark 2003: 193). Assuming that at least some of these are used jocularly, ergo
 expertly , we can state that the child is now in charge of the grammatical system. This can also be said
about the phonological system, which has by now stabilized. Naturally, vocabulary acquisition is still an
ongoing process, continuing at the fast rate of ten new words per day not only at kindergarten age, but also
later, throughout much of the elementary school period. Recapitulating, by six to eight years of age the
acquisition of language is believed to be complete. Linguistic competence has now reached the level of TRUE
SPEECH.
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2. A synopsis of the emergence of speech in first language acquisition
I. PRELINGUISTIC STAGES
(i) COOING (from ca. 3 months)
(ii) BABBLING (from ca. 4 to 10 months)
(iii) LALLING (from ca. 7 months)
(iv) ECHOLALIA (from ca. 9 months)
II. LINGUISTIC STAGES
(v) ONE-WORD STAGE (ca. 12 months)
EXPRESSION CONTENT
'Here comes Daddy!'
Dada 'This is for Daddy!'
That is where Daddy sits.'
'This shoe is Daddy s.'
(vi) TWO-WORD STAGE (from ca. 18 months to 25-30 months)
Binary semantic-syntactic relations (called by some researchers Pivot Grammar):
EXPRESSION CONTENT
actor + action Daddy come 'Daddy, he is coming.'
possessor + possessed Shoe mine 'The shoe, it s mine.'
action + object Drink soup 'I want to drink soup.'
other Apple me 'The apple, give it to me.'
No cookie "There are no cookies (left)"
(vii) BEYOND TWO WORDS: TELEGRAPHIC SPEECH (from ca. 25 months)
To be sure, three- or four-word stages can be recognized in child language, but progress is typically
measured by the average number of morphemes and/or words in a child's utterances.
EXPRESSION CONTENT
Me put it back 'I'll put it back.'
No do that again! 'Don't do that again!'
(viii) TRUE SPEECH
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3. Résumé
Summing up, we can make a few generalizations representative for modern psycholinguistics. In this light,
first language acquisition can be defined as a process common to all normal children who have sufficient
exposure to linguistic data, i.e. input best provided in the form of child-directed speech.
The process of L1 acquisition can be characterized by the following factors (based partly on Johnson &
Johnson 1998: 129):
żð acquisition is rapid, inevitable and successful;
żð by age 5 to 6, an average child is already a competent language user;
żð the process is divided into systematic stages of development;
żð it is triggered and maintained by simple contact with naturally occurring language;
żð linguistic data contained in the type of input known as  child-directed speech is generally
acknowledged to help infants to acquire language;
żð acquisition itself is not the result of correction, reward or reinforcement;
żð the mental grammar that a child develops in the course of acquisition goes beyond the information
available in the input received.
References and suggestions for further study
Berko, J. 1958.  The child s learning of English morphology . Word 14: 150-177.
Bloom, L. M. 1972. Language Development: Form and Function in Emerging Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Braine, M. D. S. 1963.  The ontogeny of English phrase structure: The first phase . Language 39: 1 13.
Clark, E. V. 2003. First Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Crystal, D. 2008. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. 6th Edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Fernández, E. M. & Smith Cairns, H. 2011. Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Field, J. 2004. Psycholinguistics. The Key Concepts. London: Routledge.
Finegan, E. 1994. Language. Its Structure and Use. Second Edition. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College
Publishers.
Gerken, L. A. 1994.  A metrical template account of children s weak syllable omissions from multisyllabic words .
Journal of Child Language 21: 565 584.
Goodluck, H. 2011.  First language acquisition . WIREs Cogn Sci 2: 47-54.
Ingram, D. 1989. First Language Acquisition. Method, Description and Explanation. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Johnson, K. & Johnson, H. (Eds.), 1998. Encyclopedic Dictionary of Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kurcz, I. 2000. Psychologia języka i komunikacji. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe SCHOLAR.
Marchman, V. A. 1997.  Models of language development: An  emergentist perspective . Mental Retardation and
Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews 3: 293-299.
Pinker, S. 1994. The Language Instinct. New York: W. Morrow & Co.
Slobin, D. I. 1973.  Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar . In Ferguson, C. & Snow, C. (Eds.),
Studies of Child Language Development. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 175-208.
Stoel-Gammon, C. 1999.  Babbling in hearing and deaf infants . In Fabbro, F. (Ed.), A Concise Encyclopedia of
Language Pathology. Amsterdam: Elsevier. 104-106.
Vihman, M. M., DePaolis, R. A. and Keren-Portnoy, T. 2009.  A dynamic systems approach to babbling and words . In
Bavin, E. L. (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
163-182.
Wells, G. 1999.  Using L1 to master L2: A response to Antón and DiCamilla s  Socio-cognitive functions of L1
collaborative interaction in the L2 classroom  . The Modern Language Journal 83/2: 248-254.
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