Phonological Acquisition

What is Phonological Acquisition ?

Phonology: the sounds of a language, how they are organized to form words The child's learning how to pronounce the words of the native language

What Does the Child Need to Learn ?

Speech sounds (consonants vowels) 'fish'; 'butter'; 'elephantHow speech sounds combine to form words (phonotactics), 'splash'; 'psash'; 'esplashVocabulary

Phonological acquisition has two parts :Learning to articulate consonants, vowels, syllables, words Learning to represent words

Summary

Stages of Acquisition

Babbling : birth to one-year

First Words

Age 1;0: first words appear Age 1;0 to 1;6: child slowly acquires 50 words or so Age 1;6: first word combinations Some Characteristics of the Child's First Words

Words have simple syllables, e.gmamaSounds are limited: m, n, b, d, w, y, f, s

Summary

Children acquire phonology over several years First year: babbling

Second year: first words Subsequent years: learn to pronounce an extensive vocabulary Sounds and syllables increase in number and complexity Phonological processes capture error patterns

By Bshayer ..

Phonetics deals with the physical aspects and characteristics of all human sounds whereas phonology is restricted to the functional aspects of sounds in a particular language

it is the process whereby children acquire the target language‟s

phonology, including its functional

aspects like the language‟s specific sound contrasts

However, in the whole acquisition process not only a set of phonological rules is chronologically acquired but also a set of morphological, syntactical and semantic rules

Furthermore, these processes are largely independent of intelligence although the degree of competence acquired may vary among individuals

children continue to commit “errors” in their speech. However, these can be to a certain degree predictable and follow logic structures. Therefore, they can be described by typical phonological processes

The first studies of child language took the form of parental diaries. The goal of these works was mostly descriptive and often had a larger focus than just language, because little was known about children behaviour acquisition .

in general ,I will be primarily concerned with issues regarding the „acquisition of phonology rather than „child phonology‟ The latter term is often used to describe phonological phenomena found in child language, without consideration of theoretical linguistic issues of

All children acquire language in the same way, regardless of what language they use or the number of languages they use. Acquiring a language is like learning to play a game.

Children must learn the rules of the language game, for example how to articulate words and how to put them together in ways that are acceptable to the people around them. In order to understand child language acquisition, we need to keep two very important things in mind

Speech sounds are of two major types –vowels and consonants:1 -Vowels are sounds produced with no obstruction to the airflow coming from lungs.

2 - Consonants are speech sounds that involve a momentary interruption or obstruction of the airflow. Consonants can be described and differentiated from each other by using three main classifications, voice, place of articulation, and manner of articulation

By Sarah ..

Stages of pre-speech vocal development

Even though children do not produce their first words until they are approximately 12 months old, the ability to produce speech sounds starts to develop at a much younger age. Stark (1980) distinguishes five stages of early speech development:[15

0-6weeks: Reflexive vocalizations

These earliest vocalizations include crying and vegetative sounds such as breathing, sucking or sneezing. For these vegetative sounds, infants‟ vocal cords vibrate and air passes through their vocal apparatus, thus familiarizing infants with processes involved in later speech production

6-16weeks: Cooing and laughter Infants produce cooing sounds when they are content. Cooing is often triggered by social interaction with caregivers and resembles the production of vowels .

weeks: Vocal play 16-30 Infants produce a variety of vowel- and consonant-like sounds that they combine into increasingly longer sequences. The production of vowel sounds (already in the first 2 months) precedes the production ofconsonants, with the first back consonants (e.g., [g], [k]) being produced around 2–3 months, and front consonants (e.g., [m], [n], [p]) starting to appear

around 6 months of age

-months: Reduplicated babbling (or canonical babbling[17 Reduplicated babbling contains consonant-vowel (CV) syllables that are repeated in reduplicated series of the same consonant and vowel (e.g., [bababa]). At this stage, infants‟ productions resemble speech much more closely in timing and vocal behaviors than at earlier stages. Starting around 6 months babies also show an influence of the ambient language in their babbling, i.e., babies‟ babbling sounds different depending on which languages they hear

-months: Nonreduplicated babbling (or variegated babbling[17

Infants now combine different vowels and consonants into syllable strings. At this stage, infants also produce various stressand intonation patterns. During this transitional period from babbling to the first word children also produce “protowords”, i.e., invented

By Noha