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Stages in First Language Acquisition
Introduction
There are many different approaches to study and analyze the developmental stages of child language. But before discussing these approaches it seems necessary to examine some introductory comments on the study of child language. It is argued that all human beings acquire a language, but there are many different languages in the world, and it seems that any human being is capable of learning any of these as a native language with equal ease. According to Pinker (1995) no child fails to learn a native language, and it is learned largely before the age of 5. Stork and Widdowson (1974) points out that there are two major factor involved the language acquisition, first an innate human potential for the acquisition of a language and secondly, a linguistics environment. Many linguistics and researchers believe that the acquisition of a language depends on upon the interaction of these two factors.
Children go through different stages in acquiring their first language. In the following section, these different developmental stages will be discussed in detail and appropriate examples and data will be presented:
Receptive and expressive language skills. Two important skills in describing the developmental of language in children are: 1. Receptive skill and 2. Expressive skill. The receptive language skill is always in advance of the expressive skill (Owens, 2010). The development of receptive skill begins at birth when the newly born infant is immediately exposed to all different kinds of noises. Before they can begin to acquire language, they must first separate non-speech noises from speech sounds. From around one month of age,

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children exhibit to distinguish among certain speech sounds. The voice is usually the child’s mother’s voice and the infant may show recognition by a facial expression such as a smile. By nine months the infant starts to respond by gesture or movement. By one year of age, infant can usually respond commands (O'Grady and Cho, 2011). The development of the expressive language skill is the beginning of active participation in speech and language. At this stage the infant can respond vocally to pain, such as hunger, pleasure and satisfaction, but these are just reflexes. The development of speech indeed begins when infant can produce sounds at will by conscious effort (Barrett, 1999). This kind of sound production is called Babbling which begins toward the end of the third month of life. Nasrin (2008) in her study stated that “a large variety of sounds is produced in this stage” (p.121). Babbling increases in frequently until the age of about twelve months, at which time the child start to produce their first understandable words (Yule, 2006). “Babbling may overlap with the production of real word for several weeks before dying out. By the time children have acquired fifty words or so” (O'Grady and Dobrovolsky and Katamba, 1996:468). By about six months he/she is producing a wide range of sounds and using them in his/her play. By nine months, he/ she is capable of responding to simple words. At this stage he/ she learns to repeat the same sound or sounds over and over again. The child usually produces a syllable consisting of consonant plus vowel which is often called reduplication stage (O'Grady and Dobrovolsky and Katamba, 1996). The child will begin to use his/her first words at about twelve months. The forms such as mama or dada, which occur very early during the reduplication stage, are not considered as words. Reduplicating syllables consisting of bilabial or alveolar consonants and low front vowels are used in many languages as children names for parents. At about the same time child begins to

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use a few recognizable words which he/ she invents for himself/herself which are called Jargon. The development of jargon is an important stage in the acquisition of language (Stork and Widdowson, 1974).
The one-word stage Yule (2006) indicated “between twelve and eighteen months, children begin to produce a variety of recognizable single unit utterances”(p.153). O'Grady and Dobrovolsky and Katamba (1996) also stated that children begin to produce one word utterances between the ages of twelve and eighteenth months. He continued that a basic property of these one word utterances is that they can be used to express the type of meaning that is associated with an entire sentence in adult speech. When the child is about eighteenth months he/she will be using perhaps about twenty meaningful words and a great number jargons. At this stage his/her communication with others is limited to single word utterances which are called Holophrastic language. The development of words into sentences is indeed the true beginning of grammar. This occurs at about twenty four month old and at first it is limited to the juxtaposition of two words and then gradually develops into more complex sentences. A child usually acquires most of the grammatical forms of native language bye five or six years old (Yule, 2006). The single word utterances of the child may be used in context which would contain different grammatical constructions in adult language (Owens, 2010). For example, according to the context and the speaker’s intent the single word sentence “teddy” could mean: I want my teddy, here is my teddy, where is my teddy or hello my teddy.

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The two – word stage
Within a few months of their first one – word utterances, children begin to produce two word “mini- sentences”. The table below provides a sampling of these utterances and the type of meaning they are commonly used to express (O'Grady and Dobrovolsky and Katamba, 1996). Some patterns in children’s two word speech
Utterance Intended meaning Semantic relation
Baby chair the baby is sitting on the chair agent- location
Doggie bark the dog is barking agent - action
Daddy hat Daddy’s hat possessor- possessed
Ken water Ken is drinking water agent- theme
Transformation-generative grammar is also used by some researchers to show the relationship between possible deep and structure. Naturally the rules for describing the child and adult language are different but the principles are the same as discussed earlier. For example we cannot ask a child to explain what he/she means by “Mummy shoe”. What we can do is to examine the non linguistic context in order to arrive at a semantic interpretation. If the child gestures towards his/her mother’s shoe when saying “mummy shoe” , it suggests that deep structure underlying the utterance is a possessive relationship which in the adult language might . if in the other hand, the child has one of his own shoes in his hand and he s‘be expressed by passes it to his mother, at the same time gesturing which his foot, we have evidence that the words “Mummy shoe” are to be given the meaning, “ put my shoe on , please” (Owens, 2010). .

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The telegraphic stage
Yule (2006) stated that between two and a half year old, the child begins producing a large number of utterances that could be classified as “multiple-word” speech. (Owens, 2019) suggested that it isn’t until real two word utterances begin that we can say that syntactic (grammatical) constructions have started to form. He added that until you have two words to rub together, then there isn’t any syntax, because syntax is about the relationship between words in a sentence. O'Grady and Dobrovolsky and Katamba (1996) argued that after a period of several months, during which their speech is limited to one and two word utterances, children begin to produce longer and more complex grammatical structure. Some representative utterances from the first part of this period follow. Chair broken Daddy like book - What her name? - Car make noise
At first, these utterances lack bound morphemes and most non-lexical categories. Because of their resemblance to the style of language found in telegrams, this acquisitional stage is often dubbed telegraphic. Over a period of several months, affixes, determiners, and auxiliary verbs emerge in accordance with the developmental sequence. A noteworthy feature of the telegraphic stage is that despite the emergence of complex new syntactic structures, children make virtually no word order errors. “Because of the diversity and sophistication of the utterances produced during the telegraphic stage, there is general agreement that this period is characterized by the emergence of powerful grammatical devices” (O'Grady and Dobrovolsky and Katamba, 1996:479).

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The cognitive development
It is claimed that language is one of many analytic activities which all depend on cognitive development. There are many suggestive similarities between language acquisition and cognitive development. During the first two years of life, for example, several cognitive advances that could facilitate language acquisition take place. One of this involves the development of object performance the ability to recognize that objects have an existence independent of one’s interaction with them(O'Grady and Dobrovolsky and Katamba, 1996). During Language acquisition is seen as having certain cognitive prerequisites or co-requests. That is, the child will not develop linguistic forms before acquiring the cognitive basis for those forms. For example, the child is expected to learn where question/location answer prior to the when question /time answer because the concept of place is acquired prior to the concept of time, and this order is cognitively determined (Owens, 2019). .
Conclusion In sum there is as yet no definite answer as how language development takes place but we are able to investigate through the application of various linguistics and psycholinguistic theories some of the complexities of child language development.

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References
Barrett, M. (1999). The development of language: studies in developmental psychology. UK. Psychology press
Nasrin, S. (2008). First language Acquisition: grammar in the speech of a two-year old Bangladeshi Child. University Journal. V(2). 121-124
O'Grady, W. &Cho, S. W. (1997) "Language Acquisition: The Emergence of a Grammar." In Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. Ed. William O'Grady, Michael Dobrovolsky and Francis Katamba. Harlow: Longman.
O'Grady, W. & Dobrovolsky, M. & Katamba, F. (1996). Contemporary Linguistics: An introduction. Harlow: Longman.
Owens, R. E. (2010). Language development: an introduction. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Pinker, S. (1995). Language Acquisition. In Gleitman, l. R. & Osherson, D. N. (Eds). An invitation to cognitive science, 2nd edition: language (pp. 135-182) MIT press
Yule, G. (2006). The study of language. Cambridge university press: New York
Stork, F. C. & Widdowson, D. A. (1974). Learning about linguistics. London: Hutchinson Ltd.
Wissam Ali Askar – 20123360
ELT – Language Acquisition