What are the stages of language development in early childhood?

In this blog, we're discussing the early childhood developmental milestones. Point to be noted, is that every child develops differently. Somehow, we will look into the general point of view.

 So, what are the areas of development in early childhood? We will try to cover up as much as possible from the point of early childhood education. I have already discussed the stages of cognitive development in one of my earlier posts.  If you haven't read it,  please go through the same. You can find the link in this blog itself.
In this post, let me brief you all about language development of the child.

 STAGES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION:

Children seem to pass through a series of more or less fixed stages, as they acquire language. The age at which different children reach each stage can vary considerably, however, the order of 'stages' remains the same.

1.Cooing/Gooing:

At around 6 weeks, a child starts cooing and gooing. Initially these sounds seem mostly like a string of vowels- 'uuuu, iiii'. At around four months, these include consonant beginnings; the most commonly heard ones are- 'cuuu, guuu'.

2.Babbling:        

                                                                            

                                                                                                                                                                   At about 6 months, when a child is generally sitting up, they progress to babbling. Here they start producing a wide variety of vowels and consonants which are mostly in the form of single consonant--vowel clusters like 'gi-gi-gi', 'ka-ka-ka', 'ma-ma-ma', 'pa-pa-pa', 'mi-mi-mi' etc. At around nine to ten months there is a variation in the combinations such as 'ba-ba-ga-ga' which become more complex like 'mim-mim-mai-yaaaaa' over the next few months; these express emotions and emphasis and include attempted imitations. To parents it seems like children are talking to them and they often react to it. This provides children with some experience of the interactive role of language.

3.One-word stage:

At around the age of one, children produce their first recognizable words. Many of these words are names of people and things that they see around them like mamaa(mother), paapaa(father), diidii(sister), ciriyaa(bird) or guriyaa(doll). Also common at this stage are words loke na(negation), khatam(something finishes) and dedo(asking for something). This stage is often referred to as the holophrastic(meaning a single word functioning as a phrase or sentence) stage. For example, instead of saying 'I want water' the child could simply say 'mam mam' (water).

4.Two-word stage:

By about one and a half years, a child generally has an active vocabulary of around some 50 words and starts putting together words in two-word utterances.

At this stage children's utterances begin to resemble the structure of sentences in the languages used around them. This speech is also referred to as telegraphic speech as it very closely resembles telegraph messages which only have content words i. e. words like doodh,  mummii, khaana,paapaa that carries meaning and doesn't use ne, ko, hai,etc.
In this stage children also start imitating, taking sentences said by adults and uttering them.

5.Longer utterances:

With time, the word length of children's sentences increase and between the ages 2 and 4 they acquire various grammatical forms. What is interesting is that most children acquire these forms in roughly the same order.
The significance of this apparent regression and the similarity in stages that children undergo to acquire language is immense. It means that language acquisition is not a straightforward case of practice brings perfection or of simple imitation.