Stages in First
Language Acquisition
Language Development
Debates
Some Issues
for Acquisition
Language Acquisition and Language Disorders
100

Stage in which infants make vegetative sounds from birth and responding to external sounds through smile and eye contact.

Pre-talking/Cooing Stage

100

Refers to all of the genes and hereditary factors that influence who we are.

Nature

100

Hypothesis that says that there is a period of growth in which full native competence is possible when acquiring a language.

The Critical Period Hypothesis

100

Language develops in a typical manner but on a delayed timeline.

Language Delay

200

Stage in which the infant can produce sounds such as consonant-vowel combinations.

Babbling Stage

200

Ability to understand spoken or written language.

Language comprehension

200

The learner's current version of the language they are learning.

Interlanguage

200

Language develops in an atypical manner often resulting in splinter skills.

Language Disorder

300

An early word-like utterance produced by an infant before it has acquired true language.

Proto-words

300

With their kids, mothers switch into a special communicative mode known as...

Motherese

300

The process of an error becoming a habit so that a student often makes it and finds it difficult to change.

Fossilization

300

Fronting, Stopping, Gliding and Assimilation are types of...

Phonological Processes

400

Characterized by short simple sentences made up primarily of content words.

Telegraphic Speech

400

Hypothesis which states that a person's perception of the world is determined and influenced by the language they speak.

Saphir-Wolf Hypothesis

400

Controversial argument from linguistics that children are not exposed to rich enough data within their linguistic environments to acquire every feature of their language.

Poverty of Stimulus

400

Education using a set of materials created as a concrete physical representation of the concepts and skills that children are naturally motivated to learn in their normal course of development.

Montessori Education

500

Name for a specific stage of language acquisition in which children apply a grammatical rule too widely.

Overgeneralization

500

Conceptualization, Formulation, Articulation and Self-monitoring are stages of the...

Language Production

500

A linguistic sign that bears no obvious resenblance to the thing or concept signified.

Arbitrary Sign

500

The construction of a computarized database for studying child language acquisition.

The CHILDES Database