Language Acquisition

At Birth

• show a preference for language over other kinds of speech
• capable of differentiating the basic sound categories or phonemes of all the world languages
• communication initially limited to a small set of facial expressions

Developing Infant (3 months to 12 months)

• distinguish sounds of their native language from those of a foreign language
• before speaking (around age 1), the range of sound distinctions they recognize becomes narrowed to native language
• physiological and anatomical changes
• social smiles
• Babbling

Age 1-2

• 13 to 14 months-10 words
• 17 to 18 months-50 words
• by age 2-200-300 words
• holophrases

Age 2-3

• language explosion
• telegraphic speech
• overgeneralization of grammatical rules
• underextensions

Age 4

• fully acquired adult-like syntax

Vocabularies of Young Children

English speaking children acquire nouns referring to objects (Bloom, 1993).
Mandarin Chinese and Korean speaking children acquire more verbs than nouns in early vocabularies (Choi & Gopnik, 1995).

• Fis Phenomenon
• The Wug Test
• Motherese