Stages of Language Development: First Words, Multiple Word Utterances, Grammatical Morphemes

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First Words

Around age one, children begin to produce their first words. These, of course, often do not sound much like adult words, but they bear some phonetic resemblance to them and, more important, they are sounds consistently produced in association with a particular meaning. First words often name things in the child’s immediate environment, such as caregivers, pets, articles of clothing, and toys, or are terms related to social interaction, such as hi and bye-bye. The meanings of first words may be overextended to other objects as well, often similar in shape: [ba] for ball, apple, sun, moon, for example. One child used [bu] for both balloons and lollipops (a round shape with a vertical line extending from its bottom). Children’s first words typically employ the same consonants children favor in the late stages of babbling: stops [p, t, k, b, d, g], nasals [m, n], and glides [y, w], and often use consonant-vowel syllable structure. The most preferred first vowel is a low back [a]. If you think about some of the child’s names for caregivers, you will see how these preferences get played out in child speech: mama, dada, papa, nana all fit children’s phonetic preferences. It has been observed, furthermore, that although children do not pronounce words the way adults do, they have certain predictable strategies for approaching adult pronunciation (Stoel-Gammon & Menn 1997, pp. 93–97). One child might make all her initial stops voiced and pronounce cat as [gæt], for example.

Children’s one-word utterances have been referred to as holophrastic, because they seem to have the same intents as longer utterances produced by adults. The one word [ba] uttered in this stage of development might mean “Give me my bottle, I see my bottle, I dropped my bottle,” and so forth, and it is left up to others to figure out the intended meaning in context. More will be said about conversational intent later in the chapter

Multiple Word Utterances: The Idea of Syntax

The next milestone in a child’s acquisition of language is the combination of more than one word per utterance. This stage marks the realization that words can combine in systematic ways to express meaning that they cannot express in isolation. Children typically begin this stage by juxtaposing two words with equal intonation on both and a pause between them, as if each were a word being pronounced in isolation. Mommy . . . Sit. Following that, children combine words into what appear to be rudimentary sentences, with no pauses between the words and falling intonation at the end. Some examples are given in Tager-Flusberg, (1997, p. 170): more car, more read, no pee, bye-bye Papa, there potty, Mommy stair. You will notice that these utterances tend to be dominated by content words, often nouns, adjectives, and verbs. For this reason, these forerunners of adult sentences have been labeled telegraphic, because they exhibit the same economy of expression that telegrams did when they served as a form of urgent and expensive communication. Most function words, such as prepositions and helping verbs, are missing from children’s initial two-word utterances, but some of the more salient ones do occur, such as more, no, and off.