Which of the following is the process of learning individual words in a language?

Vocabulary and language development in children 1-2 years

At 1-2 years, your child will learn to use and understand more words and more types of words.

At first they’ll understand and say mostly nouns – for example, ‘dog’ and ‘bus’. Eventually they’ll understand and say a few verbs – for example, ‘eat’ and ‘run’. Adjectives come next – for example, ‘big’ and ‘blue’.

At this age, your child uses meaningful words, made-up words, sounds and gestures to communicate.

Understanding and language development in children 1-2 years

At around 12 months, your child will understand the names of things they see or use often. For example, they’ll understand the words for:

• common objects like ‘cup’ or ‘doll’
• body parts like ‘tummy’ or ‘toe’
• clothes like ‘sock’ or ‘hat’.

But your child might use the same word to refer to different things. For example, they might call all animals ‘doggie’.

At around 15 months, your child will point to things and ask you to name them.

At around 18 months, your child will refer to themselves by name. A few months later, they’ll begin to understand and use ‘I’ to refer to themselves. This is when they start to realise they’re a separate person with their own ideas.

During this year, your child will understand:

• familiar phrases like ‘Give me the ball’
• simple instructions like ‘Stop that’
• very simple explanations like ‘The sun is out, so we need our hats’.

Using words and sentences

Language development includes learning to use words and sentences.

At around 12 months, your child will start using words to talk to you. Your child might also enjoy saying the same word over and over. There will probably be a lot of made-up words too.

By 18 months, your child might know and use 20-100 meaningful words. You’ll notice your child using new words nearly every day.

At around two years, your child will start putting two words together – for example, ‘mummy car’ or ‘me go’. They’ll use only a few descriptive words at this age – for example, ‘big’ or ‘red’. Their word combinations will consist mainly of nouns and some verbs (‘dog eat’, ‘car go’).

Pronunciation

Your child will use a range of speech sounds, but it’s normal for toddlers to pronounce words differently from the way adults say them. For example, your child might say ‘tar’ instead of ‘car’, or your child might leave off the ends of words altogether, like ‘ca’ instead of ‘cat’.

Your child’s pronunciation will often be hard to understand. But by the time they’re two years old, someone who doesn’t know them well should be able to understand about half of what they say.

Conversation and communication

Learning to have a conversation is part of language development.

Your child might start early conversations by drawing attention to something. For example, they might say ‘Wassat’ (‘What’s that?’), use a made up word, and/or point.

Your child will answer simple questions and also understand the difference in your tone when you ask a question or make a statement. And your child knows that if you point to something and say ‘Look’, you’re showing them something.

In general, your child understands more than they can say. Your child will try to make it easier for you to understand them by combining words, gestures and sounds and by changing the rhythm and tone of their voice.

Growing up in a bilingual or multilingual family doesn’t affect how early or quickly children learn to use language. Sometimes multilingual or bilingual children mix their languages for a while, but this stops once they understand that they’re using more than one language.

When to get help for language development

If you notice any of the following signs in your child, or you’re worried about your child’s language development, it’s a very good idea to see your child and family health nurse, GP or paediatrician.

Your child:

• isn’t interested in sounds
• doesn’t respond to their name or noises
• isn’t trying to communicate with babbling, words or gestures
• has stopped using a language skill they once had.

Children learn new skills over time and at different ages. Most children develop skills in the same order, and each new skill they learn builds on the last. Small differences in when children develop skills are usually nothing to worry about.

How do children acquire language? Do parents teach their children to talk?

No. Children acquire language quickly, easily, and without effort or formal teaching. It happens automatically, whether their parents try to teach them or not.

Although parents or other caretakers don't teach their children to speak, they do perform an important role by talking to their children. Children who are never spoken to will not acquire language. And the language must be used for interaction with the child; for example, a child who regularly hears language on the TV or radio but nowhere else will not learn to talk.

Children acquire language through interaction - not only with their parents and other adults, but also with other children. All normal children who grow up in normal households, surrounded by conversation, will acquire the language that is being used around them. And it is just as easy for a child to acquire two or more languages at the same time, as long as they are regularly interacting with speakers of those languages.

The special way in which many adults speak to small children also helps them to acquire language. Studies show that the 'baby talk' that adults naturally use with infants and toddlers tends to always be just a bit ahead of the level of the child's own language development, as though pulling the child along. This 'baby talk' has simpler vocabulary and sentence structure than adult language, exaggerated intonation and sounds, and lots of repetition and questions. All of these features help the child to sort out the meanings, sounds, and sentence patterns of his or her language.

When do children learn to talk?

There is no one point at which a child learns to talk. By the time the child first utters a single meaningful word, he or she has already spent many months playing around with the sounds and intonations of language and connecting words with meanings. Children acquire language in stages, and different children reach the various stages at different times. The order in which these stages are reached, however, is virtually always the same.

The first sounds a baby makes are the sounds of crying. Then, around six weeks of age, the baby will begin making vowel sounds, starting with aah, ee, and ooh. At about six months, the baby starts to produce strings of consonant-vowel pairs like boo andda. In this stage, the child is playing around with the sounds of speech and sorting out the sounds that are important for making words in his or her language from the sounds that aren't. Many parents hear a child in this stage produce a combination like "mama" or "dada" and excitedly declare that the child has uttered his or her first word, even though the child probably didn't attach any meaning to the 'word'.

Somewhere around age one or one and a half, the child will actually begin to utter single words with meaning. These are always 'content' words like cookie, doggie, run,and see - never 'function' words like and, the, and of. Around the age of two, the child will begin putting two words together to make 'sentences' like doggie run. A little later on, the child may produce longer sentences that lack function words, such as big doggie run fast. At this point all that's left to add are the function words, some different sentence forms (like the passive), and the more complex sound combinations (like str). By the time the child enters kindergarten, he or she will have acquired the vast majority of the rules and sounds of the language. After this, it's just a matter of combining the different sentence types in new ways and adding new words to his or her vocabulary.

Why did my daughter say feet correctly for a while, and then go back to calling them foots?

Actually, she hasn't 'gone back' at all; she's gone forward. When she used the wordfeet as a toddler, she was just imitating what she had heard. But now she has learned a rule for making plurals, which is that you add the s sound to the end of the word. So she's just applying her new rule to all nouns - even the exceptions to the rule, likefoot/feet. She'll probably do the same thing when she learns to add ed to verbs to make the past tense, saying things like he standed up until she learns that stand/stoodis an exception to the rule. She'll sort it all out eventually, but for now, rest assured that this is progress; it's evidence that she's going beyond imitation and actually learning the rules of the English language.

How can a child who can't even tie her own shoes master a system as complex as the English language?

Although the 'baby talk' that parents use with small children may help them to acquire language, many linguists believe that this still cannot explain how infants and toddlers can acquire such a complicated system so easily.

It's far easier for a child to acquire language as an infant and toddler than it will be for the same child to learn, say, French in a college classroom 18 years later. Many linguists now say that a newborn's brain is already programmed to learn language, and in fact that when a baby is born he or she already instinctively knows a lot about language. This means that it's as natural for a human being to talk as it is for a bird to sing or for a spider to spin a web. In this sense, language may be like walking: The ability to walk is genetic, and children develop the ability to walk whether or not anybody tries to teach them to do so. In the same way, children develop the ability to talk whether or not anybody tries to teach them. For this reason, many linguists believe that language ability is genetic. Researchers believe there may be a 'critical period' (lasting roughly from infancy until puberty) during which language acquisition is effortless. According to these researchers, changes occur in the structure of the brain during puberty, and after that it is much harder to learn a new language.

Linguists have become deeply interested in finding out what all 5,000 or so of the world's languages have in common, because this may tell us what kinds of knowledge about language are actually innate. For example, it appears that all languages use the vowel sounds aah, ee, and ooh - the same vowel sounds a baby produces first. By studying languages from all over the world, linguists hope to find out what properties all languages have in common, and whether those properties are somehow hard-wired into the human brain. If it's true that babies are born with a lot of language knowledge built in, that will help to explain how it's possible for a very small child - with no teaching, and regardless of intelligence level - to quickly and easily acquire a system of language so complex that no other animal or machine has ever mastered it.

For further information

Pecchi, Jean Stillwell. 1994. Child Language. London: Routedge.

Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language instinct. New York: W.W.Morrow.

"Playing the Language Game." Program Two: Acquiring the Human Language. The Human Language Series. Videocassette. New York: Equinox Films, 1995.

Smith, Neil. 1989. The Twitter Machine: Reflections on Language. Oxford: Blackwell.

FAQ by: Betty Birner

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