At the age of 6 months, a child can distinguish and recreate sounds in any language. In fact, the newborn’s first scream after being born is their desire to communicate with the world around them. Click here to learn about how children learn languages!
Figure 1: A child speaking
The Stages of Development when Learning Language
For many, the process of mastering speech and acquiring a language does not seem that difficult. When a child is born, they cry and scream. Two months later, that same child starts to laugh and in a couple more months, you’ll be able to hear their babbling. When the child is near a year old, they try to pronounce the first words that people who surround him uses. At 1.5 years, the baby's vocabulary expands rapidly. At 2 years old, the child tries to pronounce the first phrases. In just a flash, it seems that the child has mastered the sounds, learned to compare them and introduce them into speech, imitating adults, and therefore “learned to speak”! Obviously, there are a lot of processes behind this supposedly simple development. Language acquisition is one of the longest, most complex and mysterious cognitive processes in human life. Yet, from the outside, it seems to be easy.
View from Different Sciences
Researchers study the development of speech on numerous levels: phonological, morphological, semantic, syntactic, etc. But today, this issue is not only dealt with by linguistics. Other fields, such as neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and cross-linguistic research open up new facets of the problem and aid the long-standing debate of scientists about the innate and acquired factors of language learning.
Mastering speech begins with perceiving sounds - which happens even before birth. When a child begins to develop hearing in the uterus, they already hear well and recognize their mother’s voice. Moreover, according to research, the unborn child distinguishes what language is spoken: if the mother speaks in a foreign language, the fetus will react to it. At the 40th week of intrauterine development, the baby prefers sequences of words that they have already heard before.
While initially, babies are able to recognize significant differences between sounds in different languages of the world, they eventually lose this universal ability. That is why from a certain age (Around 7 – 8 years) we are unable to learn and speak a foreign language without an accent.
Communication is Key!
Some children start talking earlier than others and use more words. The difference can be seen as early as 3 months of age. It has been noticed that the more often a child interacts with an adult, the more sounds they will try to reproduce. The vocabulary of the child, the richness of their speech, and the pleasure of communication largely depend on how much and how involved adults communicate with them. Therefore, parents should communicate with their babies as often as possible and respond to all their attempts to interact. In addition, even if the baby is “not a talker” by nature, it is worth encouraging any manifestations of his desire to establish communication and more often call for potential “dialogue”.
Personal opinion
As someone who has encountered a significant amount of children with speech problems, I highly suggest every parent or caretaker pay a lot of attention to this stage of child development. As research shows, communication between a toddler and a grown adult with strong speaking skills is extremely vital as the number of children with speech disorders increases.
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