2 year-old: use one word to serve a naming function, to refer to familiar people, toys, pets, drinks and objects in the child’s environment, indicate certain actions and demands, or convey emotions.
Simple nouns and verbs
Very few functional words such as prep., art., and aux. verbs
Choose the most informative word that applies to the situation being commented upon
Overextension (underextension of reference): use the same word for things that have a similar appearance
③ the multiword stage
2-3 year-old: the salient feature of the utterances at this stage ceases to be the number of words, but the variation in strings of lexical morphemes (telegraphic speech)
Lacking grammatical morphemes, but following the principles of sentence formation [make no word order errors at this stage]
5 year-old: has an operating vocabulary of more than 2000 words
[E] The development of grammatical system
① the development of phonology
The emergence of articulatory skills begins around the age when children start to produce babbling sounds.
Children first acquire the sounds found in all languages of the world, and in later stages acquire the “more difficult” sounds.
Certain sounds that occur in babbling are lost when children began to speak the language, and then reappear at a later stage: /l/ and /r/
② the development of syntax
Children’s early language is not only semantically based, but also makes reference to syntactic categories, and grammatical relations.
Two-word stage: noun-like element + predicate-like element
Then, add functional words as well as inflectional and derivational morphemes of the language
-ing, in, on, the regular plural ending “-s”
Negative sentences: no/all gone /// negative words occur at the beginning of expressions /// insert the negative “no”, “can’t” or “don’t” inside the sentence, usually between subject and the predicate
English questions have developed in the similar way, in an interrelated way with the development of the auxiliary verb system
③ the development of morphology
Beyond the telegraphic stage: incorporate some of the inflectional morphemes
1st one: -ing; 2nd one: marking of regular plurals with the “-s” form (overgeneralization); 3rd one: -ed rule to all verbs; begin to learn both regular and irregular forms as individual words
④ the development of vocabulary of semantics
The first two years: 50-100 words
Semantic referent to a word expands: overgeneralization
The age of two and a half years: vocabulary is expanding rapidly
The age of three: hundreds of words
Connection between a word and its denotative meaning is more like that of adult language
By five: 4.6 words per sentence
Increase of about 25 words per day
The age of six: 7800 wordsà English-speaking school children
By the age of eight: 17600 words or 28300 including derived forms
In general, children have virtually acquired the basic fabric of their native language at the age of five or six.
Per-school years are crucial period for first language acquisition.