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Language Development MODULE 13 217Language Stages13-3 What are the stages of language development?Have you ever tried to learn a new language? If so, you%u2019re surely aware that language is immensely complicated. There%u2019s a lot of work involved, and even if you%u2019re diligent about it, progress is usually slow if you are a teenager or older. If you travel to an area where the language is spoken, you%u2019ll quickly realize that despite your efforts, you%u2019re nowhere near fluent. The few students who do become fluent usually still have an accent unlike that of native speakers.Why is it so much harder for you to learn the language in high school than it is for your 2-year-old cousin, who picks it up with no quizzes or vocabulary flashcards? It%u2019s because our predisposition to learn language easily exists only during the early years of our childhood. Just as we go through a maturational sequence of learning how to walk early in life, we also go through one for learning how to talk. Here are the steps involved:1. Babbling. By 4 months of age, amazing human language skills are already becoming apparent. Babies are spontaneously producing phonemes and are sophisticated enough to be able to discriminate speech sounds made by others.16,17 When babbling, children will produce phonemes they have never heard before, but within a few months they will begin to specialize in the sounds used in the languages they hear spoken. By 10 months of age, an expert can identify the language spoken in a home by merely listening to the babbling baby.18 Researchers have also demonstrated that deaf infants, when they watch their parents use sign language, babble with their hands.192. One-word stage. About the time of their first birthday, most babies begin to use their new ability to producesounds to communicate meaning. They start with short, one-syllable words like ma or da, and they may produce them so unreliably that other members of the family argue over whether the children are communicating intentionally. Babies%u2019 skills rapidly improve, however, and soon there is a vocabulary of single words used to describe both things (ball) and actions (drink). At this one-word stage, %u201cDoggy!%u201d may mean %u201cLook at the dog out there!%u201d The pace at which children learn words accelerates rapidly, and by 18 months, the average child is learning a new word every day.3. Two-word stage. By the time most children reach their second birthday, they have entered the two-word stage. Now they are building two-word sentences, called telegraphic speech. When telegrams were the fastest form of long-distance communication, users were charged by the word%u2014so telegraphic messages were brief and to the point! (Can you imagine if you were charged by the word to send a text?) Babies%u2019 telegraphic speech is much the same. These two-word sentences are short and simple, but they communicate thoughts clearly and are%u2014amazingly!%u2014grammatically correct for the language they are learning. For example, English-speaking toddlers put adjectives before nouns (big house), but Spanish-speaking toddlers put the noun first (casa grande).Beyond the Critical PeriodWe can learn language, and even more than one language, as a natural, automatic process when we are young children. But if we haven%u2019t learned language by the time we reach high school, it is much harder to master grammar and vocabulary. We should be offering foreign language in preschool!Rachel Epstein/PhotoEdit%u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Do not distribute.