According to the standard of combining the development of language system with the development of language application ability, children's language development can be divided into three stages: 0- 1 year-old is the preparation stage of children's speech production, also known as the pre-speech stage; 1-2 years old is the time when children begin to learn to speak formally. When children say the first batch of words with real meaning and generality, it marks that children begin to speak, which is also called the speech generation stage. 2-3 years old is the stage when children can express their demands and feelings clearly and completely. This stage will last until they enter school, which is the so-called stage of basically mastering spoken English. For different children, there are similarities and differences in language development at each stage.
Children's language acquisition is a dynamic concept with a process of occurrence and development. The development of children's language before the age of/kloc-0 is a related, orderly and regular process, from quantitative change to qualitative change. According to the standard of combining the development of language system with the development of language application ability, the development of children's language can be divided into:
(A) the preparation period of language development
0- 1 year-old is the preparation period of children's language development, also known as the pre-language stage. For this period, domestic research mostly focuses on how children's phonetic development prepares for language expression, while foreign researchers focus on the development of children's communicative competence. Although the emphasis is different, the observed results of children's pronunciation and phonetic development order are basically the same. This same development trend may be determined by the physiological maturity of vocal organs, but there is little difference in the maturity of vocal organs among children of all ethnic groups, so their initial phonetic development is the same.
This stage can be divided into:
1. Monosyllabic stage (0-3 months)
Crying is the main pronunciation of a baby in the first month. In this month, the baby learned to adjust the length, tone and pitch of crying. At this stage, the baby's voice discrimination level is quite high. Studies have shown that newborns have developed the ability to perceive and distinguish single sounds during the period of 0-3 months. /kloc-Newborns born on 0/2 days will have different responses to sound stimuli, such as staring or averting their eyes, stopping sucking or continuing sucking, stopping kicking or continuing kicking. This reaction can be explained as the first step of life language perception, and it is a basic ability to distinguish speech from other sounds. Babies born 24 days ago will react differently to the voices of men and women, as well as to the voices of caregivers and unfamiliar people. Babies perceive language mainly through the speaker's pitch, volume and timbre, which lays the foundation for the generation and development of language in the future.
2. Multi-syllable stage (4-8 months)
After 4 months, the child entered the stage of babbling. From this time to 1 year old, children often talk to themselves in front of toys or mirrors, showing a desire to communicate. At this stage, the number of children's hair is greatly increased, and the pronunciation content is mostly syllables combined with consonants and vowels, and there is a transition from monosyllabic pronunciation to overlapping polysyllabic pronunciation, such as Ouma and Bawa. Moreover, multi-pronunciation is a response to the social stimulation of adults. In the process of communication with adults, the rudiment of learning communication rules has emerged, and people can understand simple words, gestures and commands.
3. Germination stage (9- 12 months)
At this stage, children's different continuous syllables increase obviously, not only the repetition of one syllable, but also the pronunciation of similar words.
Language development stage (12-36 months)
After nearly a year of language preparation, children began to enter the heyday of learning spoken English. So 1-2 years old is also called the language generation stage. This stage can be divided into two stages:
1. Word sentence stage (13- 18 months)
Children's speech development from 13 to 18 months is mainly reflected in the development of speech understanding, so it is also called the stage of understanding speech. At this stage, children often use a word to express a sentence, which we call words. For example, when a child says "cookies", it may mean eating cookies, or telling his mother that the cookies are finished, or that the cookies have fallen to the ground. In short, the language at this time is very situational, and parents need to take gestures, expressions, postures and many other situations attached to their children as reference factors to determine the meaning of their children's speech.
Children at this stage understand much more than they say, although they say little and briefly. For example, children may call kittens, rabbits and sweater collars "Mao Mao", but if they take out photos of these items and ask him which is the rabbit and which is the sweater collar, he can tell the difference. In short, at this stage, children will have tight pronunciation. In the pre-speech stage, some sounds in the mother tongue can be pronounced or not, and meaningless continuous syllables are greatly reduced. They often only use gestures and actions to signal, and there will be no spontaneous pronunciation activities when they are alone, and there will be a short period of silence.
At this stage, the number of nouns and verbs that children can understand has increased significantly. They like to name objects, and the naming tends to be generalized (for example, the naming method of "Mao Mao" mentioned above), narrow (for example, the baby's first understanding of the car is his own stroller), and specialized (for example, when the baby wets Dede, the mother comes to change his diaper and says "broken", and the child will say "broken" every time he pees). In addition, at this stage, children will have some adult flavor when pronouncing. However, research shows that this is not because of pronunciation errors, but because children at this stage have a special grammar system and a phoneme system similar to their mother tongue, which will gradually disappear with age.
2. Two-word stage (19-24 months)
? This period is a period of active speech. With the expansion of children's vocabulary, children speak more actively, resulting in a "word explosion." For example, children of 18 months often say about 20 words, and by 2 1 month, they can say about 100 words. They will often pester adults and point to an object and ask, "What is this?" Ask adults to name something and then ask, "What is it for?" , and then ask "why is it called XXX" and so on. Many parents are troubled by the phenomenon that their children get to the bottom of the casserole. In fact, this is definitely a gratifying phenomenon. When a child's vocabulary reaches about 200, he begins to speak incomplete double words.
At this stage, children enter the first negative stage and like to ask questions, which makes many parents feel helpless. However, this is actually a way for children to learn a language. They began to use interrogative sentences and negative sentences frequently. Interrogative sentences show questions, while negative sentences show language resistance. At this stage, children transition from single-word sentence stage to two-word sentence stage, and begin to say "mother hugs", which is also called telegraph sentence because it is very concise and looks like telegraph language.
3. Preliminary mastery of spoken English (24-30 months)
By 24-30 months, children have made remarkable progress in using language and vocabulary, and they can use 3-5 words to organize sentences and talk to people. Their dialogue with people has become more free and smooth, and at the same time, they have begun to talk with people in relatively complete sentences, learn to listen to others and express their demands and wishes. Complex sentences began to appear, and the phenomenon of "pronunciation errors" that appeared before gradually decreased or even disappeared. Language often adopts trailing strategy, that is, in any case, only some words at the end of the question are selected to answer, which mainly occurs at this stage and will gradually disappear after 36 months. For example, just after dinner, adults ask, "Have you eaten?" The child said, "No" or "Put away your toys and go out to play with your mother, ok?" (the baby throws away the toy and looks ready to go out) but says "no", which is a tail-catching strategy. Zheng Houyao, a scholar in China, has studied this problem specially. The result of the study is that children about 30 months old also use this strategy when answering multiple-choice questions, and answer according to the latter item of multiple-choice sentences, regardless of whether it is realistic or not.
4. Initial development of target spoken English (30-36 months)
At this stage, the special language components of children's word sentences and double sentences have been greatly reduced, and the language has been brought into the track of the target language. Children have mastered the language system and basic grammar rules, have a certain vocabulary and certain language application skills, and can initially explain words with words.
Moreover, a sense of language has begun to form, and people can use language for ordinary daily communication. This marks the maturity of children's language learning.