Children develop language at a very rapid pace from birth to the age of five. Stages of language development are universal to all human beings but the pace and age at which a child reaches each stage of language development differs among children. Language development ina child is therefore compared with the norms rather than with other individual children. Generally, girls develop language faster than boys. This paper will focus on infancy stage of language development ( Pinker, S. 2009).
Infancy Stage
Towards the end of pregnancy, the fetus begins to hear sounds and speech coming from outside the womb meaning that language development begins before birth. Infants are attuned to sounds from humans and prefer them to other types of sounds. They particularly prefer the high pitch characteristics of the female voice. Infants pay a lot of attention particularly to the human face especially when a person is talking. Language begins to develop through repetition and imitation.
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Between Birth and Three Months of Age
Infants within this age bracket acquire the following abilities: they cry differently to express different needs, grunt, chuckles, whimper, and gurgle, seems to recognize their mother’s voice, they turn towards familiar voices and sounds, they make sounds indicating pressure and make vowel-like sounds such as ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’, among other developments as may be portrayed by children in different environment ( Brown, 1973).
Between Three and Six Months
At this age, most infants turn their heads towards the speaker, respond to changes in a tone of voice, sputter loudly and blow bubbles and make louder sounds including screeches among other changes. The sounds and bubbling are identical in babies throughout the world.
Between The Age of Six and Twelve Months
This is a crucial age receptive language development. Infants begin to experiment with pitch, intonation, and volume, use their tongues to change sounds, make long more varied sounds, listen intently to speech and other sounds and also babble in a singsong with as many as 12 different sounds. Infants between nine and twelve years listen when spoken to, repeat sounds, engage in much vocal play and understand gestures among other changes. Infants have a different pace in these developments due to their biological and environmental differences ( Schroeder, 1970).
References
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages . Harvard U. Press.
Pinker, S. (2009). Language learnability and language development, with new commentary by the author (Vol. 7). Harvard University Press.
Schroeder, W. (1970). Language Development Of The Preschool Child. Preschool programming of children with disabilities , 35.
