Child Language Acquisition

In their early years, children’s mouths are not fully developed and are unable to form the majority sounds as a result. This is due to the fact that the larynx is in a raised position; in order to allow the baby to breathe whilst suckling on the mother’s breast. It also significantly reduces the likelihood of choking as the larynx is pushing on the throat, thus reducing it’s diameter and the likelihood of allowing solid objects through. As the child ages, the larynx will drop by 3cm and the full vocal range will become available. The child will have to learn how to use its vocal chords to make the sounds necessary for speech. This is something that, as adults, we take for granted but is a very complex task. It takes 30 muscles operating in a specific way to produce a single sound.

As the child enters the toddler stage, they are learning a staggering 10 words every day. They will also gain the concept of self-awareness. They start to use the words ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘my’ to refer to themselves. This is a very complex abstract concept to grasp for children and one that most other animals never will. Communication is often a lot easier at this stage as the child automatically knows how to construct sentences with proper grammar as they have picked up the proper methodology from those around them. However, they are not completely immune to making errors. One more common example of an error made by children at this stage is over-generalisation. This is where a child will apply what they believe to be a grammatical rule (such as pluralising by adding an ’s’) but they do not realise that there are exceptions to these rules like the word ‘mouse’; an irregular verb that in its plural form is mice. Gleason devised a test to prove this phenomena called ‘The Wug Test’. During the test, children were first shown a picture of a made up creature which they were told was a ‘Wug’. They were then shown a picture of two of these creatures and indirectly asked to complete the sentence “There are two …”. Every child would answer the same; “Wugs”, thus proving this theory.