Language Acquisition

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Language Acquisition

There are four basic stages of language acquisition namely; babbling stage, one-word stage, two word stage and telegraphic stage. During One-word stage ,children can name things, do things which define the actions they are about to take, use social interaction words like no, yes and say things which describe something(modifiers).The child at this stage is able to name objects and pronounce people names  like mommy ,papa, cat, mouse just like adults. They can differentiate between objects and actions. However, when they cannot construct a sentence but use one word to describe something. For example, “cake” instead of “I need a cake”. Children can utter atleast two words, which fall into a basic set of meaning. A child is able to say words like “daddy cake”. These words have both rising and falling intonation just like in adult speech. The child omits verbal tense endings and functional words unlike in adult speech. In the other stage which the telegraphic, the child can pronounce words correctly but may omit unstressed words and use pronouns wrongly. A child instead of saying “I” can say “me”. The order of words is usually correct like “play with me grandpa”. The child can omit determiners like “the” and “a”.

The acquisition of second language is processed differently by the brain. Adults learning the second language differ from children learning a first language. Adults may not reach the same competence as the speakers of the language he or she is learning unlike kids who can achieve it faster. Some errors made by adults learning second language originate from their first language. Adults attain fluency as they learn to express ideas in new medium as they learn how to apply learned rules. Children make errors when learning the adult native language but they can speak it fluently as they grow. Adults learning second language almost go through the same stages as children. During early stages of adult second language acquisition, they speak in short phrases of one or two words and can make mistakes while pronouncing them, as they continue learning, speech starts to develop they can communicate through simple questions and phrases. Children learning a second language are more likely to achieve the native fluency than adults are. Also, in learning first language children